This movie was really reminiscent of John Carpenter's The Thing which
I loved, and I have to say I've been a Ron Perlman fan ever since
City of Lost Children. So basically you take these two elements together,
throw in a great storyline, some great acting, an incredible ending,
mix it all together... and you have a solid 8. Go see it! It's great!
Larry, please, make The Last Winter part 2! Link

Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film “The
Last Winter,” crawling through the hallways and howling into
the dread night. Set in the blinding white beauty of the Alaskan wilderness
(though mostly shot in Iceland), the story brings us close to a small
research team scouting the crude commercial possibilities for a large
oil concern. Under the corporate rubric of “energy independence,”
the company hopes to drill through the permafrost, a scheme that promises
shivers that have nothing to do with the cold. Ah, but the ice is
melting, melting, which makes the truth as inconvenient as it is deadly.

It’s amazing what you can do with a low budget, an expansive
imagination and a smooth-moving camera. (A fine cast helps.) An heir
to the Val Lewton school of elegantly restrained horror, wherein an
atmosphere of dread counts far more than a bucket of blood and some
slippery entrails, the director Larry Fessenden is among the most
thoughtful Americans working on the lower-budget end of this oft-abused
and mindlessly corrupted genre.

Apocalyptic in title and tone, “The Last Winter,” written
by Robert Leaver and Mr. Fessenden, breathes fresh air into a stale
setup (an isolated group gone stir crazy or something) by insisting
that our everyday horrors aren’t a matter of arid news reports
but of feverishly real, terrifying life.
And death, of course: for the wind-battered and sunburned team running
the outpost, debased life will soon beget anguished death, drop by
bloody drop. But first there are signs and visions, cawing black birds
and mysteriously thundering hooves.

During the day the team’s lead science researcher, Hoffman (James
Le Gros), stares into the surrounding wild whiteness like a writer
searching for words, for anything, in front of a never-ending and
terrifyingly empty sheet of paper. At night he slips into the obliterating
darkness with a company true believer, Abby (Connie Britton), who
once offered shelter to the team’s boisterous leader, Pollack
(Ron Perlman), a comic-strip villain with a cigar and a mouthful of
gravel and nonsense.

There are others wandering the corridors, oiling the machinery, filling
in the blanks and ably hitting their marks: a mechanic named Motor
(the reliable Kevin Corrigan); another scientist, Elliot (a very fine
Jamie Harrold); a stray lamb, Maxwell (Zach Gilford); a smiling cook,
Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah); and a mystery man with piercing eyes, Lee
(Pato Hoffmann), who seems to know more than anyone else but doesn’t
ask and never tells.

Each adds another part of the story with a laugh, a gesture or even
louder silences. Twisting his lips and adjusting his glasses, Elliot
puts Hoffman into an even more eccentric light than he might otherwise
appear, undermining our faith in the very character (the lead, perhaps
the hero) toward whom the film seems to be nudging us.

The question of Hoffman’s role, as well as of his trustworthiness,
hovers over the story, leaking into the camp hallways like a gas.
With his soft, youthful face glazed red-brick and partly obscured
by his beard, Mr. Le Gros invests the character with sympathy without
making him especially likable. There’s something closed off
about this man, despite his nocturnal visits and talks with Abby,
as if he’d already surrendered part of himself to some other
force. He’s the first to sound the alarm, though it isn’t
initially clear if his early warnings, delivered with mad-prophet
quiet and ominously scribbled research notebooks, mean that he’s
the canary in the coal mine or the cat in the birdhouse. Our desire
for a hero is as unsettling as it is instructive.

Against the vast white of “The Last Winter,” every man
and woman eventually looks like a blot on the landscape, like a mistake.
Working with the Icelandic cinematographer G. Magni Agustsson, Mr.
Fessenden makes great expressive use of his natural canvas and its
negative space, playing with the depth of field so that the whiteness
either seems to stretch on forever or suddenly flatten, at times turning
these fully dimensional human figures into silhouetted cutouts.

This metaphorically resonant visual trick works beautifully for Mr.
Fessenden’s genre and political purposes, adding pathos and
urgency to the creeping unease. Here, when someone’s nose begins
to bleed, it isn’t long before that drip turns into a gusher.LINK

The fourth feature from idiosyncratic American independent director
Larry Fessenden, The Last Winter expertly conflates the psychological
dread fundamental to the horror genre, broadening it out into a deeper,
existential malaise about the disintegration of civilisation.

A story about the madness that engulfs a disparate group at a remote
Alaskan drilling site, the movie is clearly influenced visually and
thematically by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and John Carpenter’s
version of The Thing. It is marred by some didactic passages about
ecological and corporate plunder, but otherwise this unnerving allegory
on greed and conquest was one of the major discoveries at Toronto.

Admittedly, it is a difficult film to market: like the works of George
Romero, The Last Winter is an intellectual horror movie that mourns
the loss of humanity. The right US distributor should find a way to
take advantage of the movie’s strong visual qualities, excellent
cast and probing content to reach a discerning audience. Internationally,
the film’s topical concerns about the devastating environmental
consequences of developing alternate energy sources carry a strong
contemporary relevance.

A team of scientists and engineers is dispatched by North Industries,
an American energy conglomerate, to a remote outpost of the Alaska
frontier for a top-secret drilling expedition. Fessenden expertly
draws out the group dynamics, quickly establishing the tension between
Hoffman (LeGros), the scientist assigned to assess the environmental
impact, and Pollock (Perlman), the entrepreneurial, driven drill leader
who is highly sceptical of Hoffman’s credentials. Their rivalry
is exacerbated by their shared sexual history with Abby (Britton),
who is now sleeping with Hoffman.

But the crew’s private drama is soon replaced by strange, unexplainable
actions at their command centre. Abnormally high temperatures imperil
the group’s ability to import the heavy machinery required for
the drill; later Maxwell (Gilford), the least experienced member,
goes missing and turns up at the base hours later but subject to increasingly
bizarre behaviour.

Soon it becomes clear that something is dangerously amiss, as the
group’s severe isolation and the increasing presence of some
primordial force slowly begins their collective unraveling. Maxwell,
is the first to die but not the last, as fellow workers succumb to
a variety of demises, from a plane crash to suffocating each other.

Eventually Hoffman and Pollock undertake a perilous quest to get help
that evolves into their mysterious and unnerving confrontation with
the malevolent force.
The Last Winter is an unusual work, an art movie that frightens and
disrupts. Fessenden’s tone is to effectively underplay the horror,
as the stillness and foreboding sense of rupture contribute to the
developing panic.

It loses a little something in the final act, when Fessenden finally
unveils the ghostly, spectral presence that haunts the group, but
by then it is governed by a sharp, punishing and dismayingly believable
pessimism about the human condition that instils fright in its audience.

Shooting in Iceland, Fessenden uses the blindingly white snowbound
landscapes to signal an inescapable sense of doom and terrifying regret.
Working with cinematographer G Magni Agustsson, he deploys sinuous,
vertiginous camera movements and vertical, high overhead shots that
underline the emphatic break between civilisation and nature: the
The Last Winter’s power is in how actions and events are felt
as much as they are seen.

The effects work is strong, presenting the crew’s nemesis in
two guises: a massive, almost alien figure; and a spectral, ghost-like
herd of deer which charge in huge formations and stomp a couple of
victims to death.

Larry Fessenden works with horror and irony the way Giacometti worked
with clay—paring away at conventions, shaving matters down to
their starkest. This might not bode well for his hapless characters’
physical welfare, but it does preserve the dread.

Fessenden’s Habit (97) was a Looking for Ms. Goodbarwith fangs,
and one of the first films to cocktail shake sex, blood, and HIVinto
a horror context; Wendigo (01), a chiller rooted in Indian lore about
transmogrification, turned the seemingly placid terrain of snowy upstate
New York into a realm of gothic foreboding.

It’s the second of these that echoes in Fessenden’s latest,
The Last Winter, which is set in Alaska, and in which, unlike any
of its obvious progenitors in Arctic creep—from The Thingto
Zero Kelvin—the problem with the frosty landscape is that it
isn’t cold enough. Centered on a group of oil prospectors, it
is invested with a fear not of the supernatural, but the natural:
the world is warming and as it thaws, something angry and septic is
being unleashed out of the long-dormant, no-longer-perma permafrost.

The director, working from a script by himself and Robert Leaver,
finds a lode of Hitchcockian potential out of doors, where snow makes
a nightly flight across the stark white light of G. Magni Agustsson’s
camera and where the more delusional members of the North Industries
drilling team see phosphorescent herds of antlered phantoms stampeding
through the gloom. Unexplained nosebleeds. Naked blue-white corpses
with their eyes plucked out. Madness. Team leader Pollack (Ron Perlman),
the quintessential short-fused, unmanageable manager, has quite a
few problems on his hands.

The principal one, he thinks, is his polar opposite, Hoffman (James
LeGros), an environmental activist and, significantly, Pollack’s
physio-aesthetic rebuttal. Hoffman, who is there to monitor the ethically
dubious North company, is emblematic of economy and conservation—he
lacks the enormous resources, shall we say, of a Pollack, but has
done as much as he can with what he has. (Think Richard Dreyfuss in
Jaws.) Pollack, meanwhile, is ignorant, avaricious, and wastefully
huge (think . . . the United States?). And there’s something
larger than both of them, and far more dangerous, out there in the
Great White North.

A lifelong New Yorker, Fessenden—whose sideline acting career
has included playing an emergency-room patient strapped to a gurney
in Bringing Out the Dead—doesn’t seem overly fond of the
great outdoors. He finds in the tundra’s poverty of physical
detail something vaguely corrupt. Characters often float in white,
negative space, and the varied, always-fluid shooting suggests a searching
for something to grasp hold of.

Fessenden has been long producing work by maverick filmmakers, often,
but not always, in the horror genre (Douglas Buck’s 2006 remake
of Sisters, for instance, but also Kelly Reichardt’s 1994 River
of Grass, in which Fessenden played the lead). What he brings to his
own film is an increasingly confident, collagist instinct with style
and camera movement, a marriage of the visual with the visceral. No
one comes away from films like Saw and Hostel thinking much about
the lighting or the transitions, but even though The Last Winter has
a certain immediacy, it also has a cumulative richness born of both
terror and technique, plus a juxtaposition of interpersonal, indoor
relationships against an ethereal, frigid void that stands in for
the entirety of a miserable, exploited, and pissed-off planet. The
Last Winter isn’t a message movie per se, but the inconvenient
truth of the matter is that Fessenden, as he did with Habit’s
post-AIDS vampire treatment, has found something profoundly, metaphysically
scary within the facts and figures of global warming.

The Last Winter is a perfect compliment to The
Host: both are potent eco-horror movies featuring vengeful, metaphorical
manifestations of the dangers of environmental neglect. But where
Bong Joon-Ho’s wildly entertaining crowd-pleaser posits a solution
to pollution, Larry Fessenden’s slyly allusive account of group
of oil-mongers fending off madness and malevolent Earth spirits in
the Arctic (shades of The Thing and The Shining, and, pointedly, The
Birds) builds mournfully towards total apocalypse. The film feels
a logical extension of the director’s previous hell-hath-no-fury-like-mother-Nature-scorned
masterpiece Wendigo (2002), and, in its odd blend of ellipticism and
direct allegory, it’s probably the closest an American director
will ever come to making a Kyoshi Kurosawa movie. Fessenden says he
wants to make “B-movies with A-ideas in them,” and he’s
succeeded astonishingly. Link

Alaska also kills
a lot of unwitting people in writer-director Larry Fessenden’s
unnerving global-warming ghost picture The Last Winter. Like his Wendigo,
the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and
angered by human disrespect—the old Indian-graveyard paradigm,
as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie. The setting
is the satellite office of an oil company—set in the middle
of frigid, blinding white blankness. A company geologist (the intensely
likable, underused James LeGros) has grave concerns about the melting
permafrost, but the boss (Ron Perlman in one of his entertaining blowhard
turns) puts profit (and authority) before all—even after members
of the team begin dropping dead from some nameless terror and getting
their eyes picked out by ravens. There’s something under that
permafrost, encased for millions of years, now awake and pissed-off.
The Last Winter was shot in northern Iceland and Alaska, and despite
some too-explicit imagery in the final moments, the claustrophobia-to-psychosis
continuum is harrowingly fluid. Link

THE
VILLAGE VOICE -
Nathan Lee,
September
18th, 2007 12:04 PMThe Winter of Major Discontent:
See Larry Fessenden's latest and you'll never complain about flurries
again

Set at the base
camp of a corporate expedition to establish an oil-mining operation
in the Alaskan Arctic circle, The Last Winter is one of those ghost
stories concerned with an accursed house built atop ancient burial
grounds— except here the house is civilization itself, and the
angry spirits are those of ancient plants and animals rising from
the chthonic sludge of crude oil. Mother Earth taking revenge for
a localized intrusion is one way to parse this canny conceptual horror
film, and one way to account for what appears to be the rampage of
demonic CGI caribou. Another way to see it is as a fable of speculative
evolution: This is what happens when our time on the planet is up;
this is, literally, the last winter of humankind.

The latest from independent fright-flick auteur Larry Fessenden (Habit,
Wendigo) is careful not to explain the exact nature of its mounting
crises: strange phenomenon at the horizon, the onset of madness and
suicide among the crew, vehicular malfunction, psychological meltdowns,
crows pecking the eyes out of nude popsicle corpses. Fessenden executes
his ambiguities with great precision of mood and atmosphere, maximizing
the unfathomable dimensions of his white-on-white wasteland, the claustrophobic
interiors of the base camp, and the perks of a far larger production
than he's accustomed to, milking those helicopter shots for all they're
worth.

Ever a resourceful director of actors, his human touch falters somewhat
in the rote psychodrama that pits the ego of a corporate blowhard
(Ron Perlman) against the conscience of an environmental consultant
(James LeGros), then triangulates the two in a jealous love triangle
with a scientist (Connie Britton) of vague motives. But it's the imaginative
background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action,
that counts—and unnerves—in this most chilling of global-warming
movies. LINK

Far and away the scariest movie of the year - and certainly the smartest,
"The Last Winter" delivers a much more frightening warning
about global warming than any superstar-hosted documentary.

Consistently chilling (no, that's not a pun), with crisp, haunting
visuals and sound character relationships, this latest work from Larry
Fessenden ("Wendigo") proves that low-budget, indie horror
films can not only be about something important but are at their best
when doing so.

The film was shot with an old master's sense of composition, space
and the magical power of what and what not to show by the young cinematographer
G. Magni Agustsson in his native Iceland. Most of it takes place at
a remote Alaskan energy company outpost in late winter. Plants are
poking up through the thinning snow, rain falls, and carnivorous crows
are coming back to roost much too early. The permafrost is melting,
undermining the ice roads commonly used to truck goods in and out
of Arctic oil country - and releasing God-knows-what that's been frozen
in the ground for untold thousands of years.

Gruff company honcho Ed (Ron Perlman) flies back to the little collection
of sheds and Quonset huts after some time south at headquarters. Jovial
but intimidating, Ed is unhappy to find that the two environmentalists
the corporation hired to make an impact study are sure that temperatures
are rising too fast to make oil drilling in the area ecologically
safe - or probably even feasible. Ed is even less pleased to discover
that his former lover Abby (Connie Britton) has taken up with furry
tree-hugger James (James LeGros).
The two men inevitably lock horns. And as things grow more and more
dire out on the tundra, their arguments come to represent different
philosophies and interpretations of the natural crisis that threatens
to engulf them.

This may sound cerebral, but it's played out with rising visceral
terror. Something - sour gas emissions from an old well maybe, but
probably far worse - starts affecting everybody, both mentally and
bodily. People run naked into the frigid wilderness at night (it may
technically be getting warm, but it sure ain't warm enough for that).
Tough guys wet their beds. Was that the wind, or did a herd of ghost
elk just stampede by?

"Last Winter" leaves much to the imagination, but not in
the incoherent manner of most modern horror films. While Fessenden
definitely proposes that something's going very screwy with the world,
his movie shrewdly suggests that the exact nature of the Earth's counterattack
may well be unfathomable. What we don't know, what we don't want to
know, what we can't figure out in time; these are the true demons
stalking "The Last Winter."

After watching
mankind wreck her handiwork, Mother Nature's vengeance shifts from
global-warming-slow to horror-movie-swift in "The Last Winter."
Most physically expansive feature to date by Larry Fessenden sports
the virtues of his prior efforts ("Habit," "Wendigo"),
which are also their commercial limitations -- i.e. an emphasis on
character dynamics, slow-burning tension and offbeat narrative rather
than the usual genre checklist of monster sightings, false scares
and gory deaths. U.S.-Iceland co-prod is an imperfect but compelling
thriller that will probably fare best in ancillary -- a pity, since
its wide-open-space compositions cry for the bigscreen.

Stark Alaskan setting (exteriors were shot both there and in Iceland)
and paranoid atmosphere recall "The Thing," as a crew similarly
shacked up in blandly functional, claustrophobic live-work quarters
gradually come undone in the face of an unknown, largely unseen enemy.
In this case, they're a team sent by North Industries to prepare for
oil extraction from the hitherto protected Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. Desperate for "energy independence," the government
is clearly entwined with corporate interests. But to put a good face
on things they've allowed two free-agent "Greenies" -- esteemed
ecological watchdog/author James Hoffman (James Le Gros) and his assistant
Elliot (Jamie Harrold) -- to do a environmental impact study before
drilling begins. The principled James isn't about to just let commerce
go its merry way. He was at the Kuwaiti oil fires (glimpsed utilizing
clips from Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness") and the
Exxon Valdez spill, and fears consequences at least as disastrous
here -- already, unseasonably warm temperatures are creating logistical
problems, and there are signs that the permafrost is melting.

His suspicions that there is seriously "something off" are
treated as wacko and a needless obstacle by macho, hot-tempered team
leader Pollock (Ron Perlman), who's just returned from five weeks
at corporate headquarters. Nor is Pollock's mood lightened by discovering
that in his absence, second-in-command Abby (Connie Britton) has shifted
her warm bodily allegiance from his bed to James'. Hoffman's foreboding
and Pollock's obstinacy each gain in collision-ready force as a series
of mystifying events occur. Communication and power go haywire, cutting
the inhabitants off from outside help. Young intern Maxwell (Zachary
Gilford) goes missing, and when he is found at the site of a 20-year-old
test drilling, he has been traumatized to near-catatonia by some encounter
he can't articulate. His freak-out presages a series of illogical
behaviors, inexplicable health problems and disturbing accidents that
start whittling the station's human population down.

Horror fans used to more conventional material may find buildup too
slow, supernatural aspects too restrained, and the final payoff too
vague and not ghastly enough. (Most harrowing scenes are realistic
perils, like one figure's sudden plunge through thin ice into freezing
waters.) But "Last Winter" succeeds precisely where most
contempo horror films cut corners, in creating credible characters
whose fate we come to dread amidst situations that reel out of control
degree by methodical degree.

G. Magni Agustsson's lensing is a great assist, as it makes the arctic
landscape a still, merciless menace toward the frail intruders' well-being.
Music is used very sparingly, with astute wider deployment of Anton
Sanko's ambient soundscapes. Solid cast is headlined by Perlman in
assertive familiar form as a bullying but not unsympathetic he-man.
But burden of conviction here falls on the always excellent Le Gros,
who in a rare lead registers all the intelligent unease that the increasingly
far-fetched tale needs for suspension of viewer disbelief. Link

What a pleasure
it has been to watch the development of writer/director Larry Fessenden’s
career, as his films have slowly gained in scope while maintaining
an intensely personal vision, exploring deep themes while succeeding
on a pure genre level. THE LAST WINTER is his biggest film yet in
both scale and thematic ambition, tackling the hot-button theme of
global warming with an approach that favors dramatic impact over didacticism.
Only those who sit down already inclined to feel like they’re
going to be preached to could find fault with it; the rest will enjoy
a movie packed with atmosphere and a chilly feeling only partially
due to the Alaskan setting.

The wilds of that northern state is where a small team is prepping
the site of an impending oil-drilling operation as the story begins.
Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), head of the operation, will brook no interruptions,
and isn’t especially happy about the arrival of James Hoffman
(James LeGros), who’s there to prepare an environmental impact
statement. Having witnessed other disastrous example of people’s
negative effect on ecosystems, Hoffman is already inclined to deliver
bad news to Pollack, and soon finds that rising temperatures are posed
to throw roadblocks in the team’s way (literally; the lack of
subzero conditions means that the “ice roads” necessary
to transport equipment can’t be established).

Meanwhile, nature begins to strike back in more direct albeit initially
subtle ways. The environment seems to be having a deleterious effect
on the team’s minds, starting with Maxwell (Zachary Gilford),
a young worker who goes off on a scouting trip and doesn’t return.
Others in the group begin suffering from mental and physical debilitation,
and Hoffman starts to wonder: Is it the result of “sour gas”
(hydrogen sulfide from deep in the Earth seeping up due to the melting
of the permafrost), or something a little more paranormal in nature?
One thing’s for sure: Pollack’s sour mood at what he sees
as Hoffman’s meddling isn’t helped by the fact that the
newcomer is bedding his assistant and former lover Abby (Connie Britton).
The interpersonal conflicts and signs of impending doom are played
out against a stark background of marvelously foreboding locations
(filmed in Iceland), and Fessenden employs both tight close-ups and
wide vistas to emphasize the characters’ isolation. The script
he wrote with Robert Leaver maintains a level of drama and characterization
that holds the attention throughout, even before any of the horror
elements come into play. As in Fessenden’s previous film, the
marvelous family-breakdown chiller WENDIGO, the filmmaker engages
our sympathy for, or at least understanding of, everyone on screen,
and while his own stance on the subject of global warming (a phrase
which he smartly uses only once in the dialogue) couldn’t be
clearer, he avoids making Pollack an obstinate monster and Hoffman
an environmental knight in shining armor. The former is a man devoted
to progress and a job well done who truly believes he’s serving
his country by providing homegrown energy sources, while there are
suggestions that Hoffman has let his activism curdle into unreasonable
obsession.

Everyone on screen, in fact, develops a genuine personality, and the
performances are first-rate across the board. With his protagonists
so well-established, Fessenden mercilessly tightens the screws in
the second half, as the landscape’s rebellion against those
who would despoil it becomes increasingly direct. There are a couple
of great jump-out-of-your-seat jolts, but for the most part the director
develops an eerie intensity that builds to a boil and doesn’t
let up for the entire last act. It’s not giving too much away
to reveal that the spirit of the Wendigo makes a return appearance,
and while THE LAST WINTER employs the most expansive special FX yet
in a Fessenden film, he uses them judiciously so that they don’t
overwhelm the narrative. Even when he stages a plane crash, his focus
remains on the destructive results on the ground, rather than the
spectacle.

Although Fessenden’s movies have always looked good even on
their smallest budgets, THE LAST WINTER (his first feature in widescreen)
contains his most striking visuals yet, as he has teamed with cinematographer
G. Magni Agustsson to create exterior environments of white desolation
and confined interiors increasingly suffused in threatening darkness.
Just as crucial to the movie’s success are Jeff Grace’s
music and Anton Sanko’s eerie ambient soundscapes, which help
turn the setting into an antagonist of its own. Yet even if the environment
becomes something of a villain, its actions, like those of the humans
occupying it for just a short time, are justified by the situation.
THE LAST WINTER makes an impact statement of its own: Without preaching,
it puts an up-to-the-minute spin on the traditional horror-movie lesson
that it’s not wise to tamper with Mother Nature. Linktop

PREMIERE
by Aaron Hillis (posted 9/21/07)

An indie auteur whose creative integrity is easy for cinephiles to
get behind, actor-filmmaker Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has become
a sort of heir apparent to American horror mavericks like George Romero
and Larry Cohen, in that each of his films — unlike the artless
gore-fests that blight the genre today — is a richly drawn,
ambitious character piece both socially relevant and genuinely suspenseful.
Fessenden's latest and most polished production to date presents a
northern Alaska–set eco-cautionary terror tale, in which the
villain might be a physical manifestation of an angry environment
itself — is it that humans are actually the monsters and become
a target of planetary vengeance for global warming?

Conservatives and Al Gore haters are seeing red now, but the only
thing you shouldn't be scared of is Fessenden's progressive agenda,
since both sides of this so-called partisan issue are fairly represented
in the film's complex humanizations. Isolated at an arctic outpost
owned by Big Oil, an advance team exploring drilling potential is
led by blowhard skipper Pollack (a pitch-perfect Perlman), a steadfast
company man who is entirely irked by the presence of environmental
impact surveyor Hoffman (an equally compelling Le Gros) — and
not just because the latter has been shacking up with Pollack's next-in-command
Abby (Connie Britton). Manly clashes ensue, their dinnertime debates
punctuated by iconic news footage: clips from the Exxon Valdez spill,
the Kuwaiti oil fires, busy weathermen and the like, each image a
talking point as if healthy chatter were enough to turn off this apocalypse-in-waiting.
When the permafrost starts melting, ghostly winds kick up something
fierce, and a crewmember turns up dead and naked in the snow, everyone
begins succumbing to unseen forces (or is it their collective psychological
breakdown?), and a wicked atmosphere of claustrophobia materializes
through Fessenden's cunning sense of widescreen spatiality: nightmarish
empty corridors and elegantly swirling aerials ominously gazing down
from the skies. This is filmmaking both gorgeous and deeply unsettling.

The inability to go home again is the inconvenient truth at the heart
of Fessenden's story, and his passion/frustration is so palpable that
he nearly loses his footing by making the wrong thing literally tangible:
the ambiguous enemy itself. The film offers the director's first foray
into CGI, but although it's used sparingly, the last-act unearthing
of an antlered, semi-transparent creature is diminishingly literal-minded
in the same way the final shot is rightfully so: a confused and regretful
survivor walks out into seasonably inexplicable rain, standing trembling
beside a gas-guzzling SUV. It's blunt, yes, but should an emotional
message of worldwide alarm be anything less than so? LINKtop

THE
NEW REPUBLIC by Stanley Kauffmann

The
world's energy problems have been winding through films, one way or
another, at least since The China Syndrome in 1979. The Last Winter
is fundamentally on this subject, but its focus is unusual. The film
is set in a station along an Alaskan pipeline, a station of some size
and comfort where a group of men and a few women keep watch. The subject
of energy in this case becomes a matter not primarily of economics
and politics but of personal conditions--a relatively few people clumped
together in the middle of immense emptiness.
An oil rig in mid-ocean is the immediate comparison, but the oil-rig
crew has the limitation and (as it turns out) the blessing of never
leaving their station. These people in Alaska have phones and computers
and video, but they are surrounded by space that they must continually
explore--three hundred and sixty degrees of snow that only at first
seems static, arctically pastoral.

The screenplay is by Robert Leaver and the experienced director Larry
Fessenden. This was my first encounter with Fessen- den's work, despite
his reputation for high-level scare films, and very quickly indeed
it is clear that he is not any kind of exploitation maven. He is gifted,
knowledgeable, keen--possibly a bit canted in his choice of materials
but an authentic, serious film-maker. More: he establishes these points
less by the vistas of immensity, although they are stunning, than
by the way he handles the corridors and rooms and doorways within.
The oil station begins early to remind us of the spaceship in 2001.
The station is (yes) stationary, and the space outside is not super-cosmic,
merely incredible, but again the people within are bound together
by more than physical proximity.

The story, which has mostly to do with the authority of the chief
and with one of the women, is adequate but is only the means of dealing
with the themes. What really happens here is that, while the story
is going on, the real conflict is between the space outside and the
diminutive human beings within it. Eventually this conflict has a
dire effect on one of the crew, and consequences follow. Mentions
recur throughout of world matters like global warming, but the film
is really about a set of specific human circumstances that follow
from those huge matters.

Well, up to a point. Now comes some shaded news. Around two-thirds
of the way through the film, a severe accident occurs at the station,
and The Last Winter suddenly shifts from the subjects above to a much
more usual drama of physical survival in dangerous conditions. The
radios and phones go out, people get hurt, the chief and one of the
crew set out on snowmobiles for the nearest station, twenty-five miles
away. The film's whole tone shifts--from subtle mystery to blunt drama.
The new tone is scarily handled, but it is a lesser film. Apparently
the writers felt that the natural conclusion of the larger drama they
had begun would take too long and would not be vivid enough. So they
threw in the accident--tingly but a chromatic transposition.

Fessenden, who is his own editor, has splashed in from time to time
some glimpses of a character's thoughts or fears or past or future,
all of which help to maintain the atmosphere of overview that carries
most of the picture. The cast is certainly adequate, especially the
chief, played by Ron Perlman. Decades ago I used to see Perlman in
avant-garde drama Off-Broadway. Time and adventure have now brought
him to gruff authority in the midst of the Alaskan wild.

And that brings up the last fascinating point. It is not Alaska. The
picture was shot in Iceland. The cinematographer, G. Magni Ágústsson,
is Icelandic. If the fact that this is his native country helped him
with his exterior lighting, it is certainly a boon. But his interiors
are at least as good, subtly lit, precise. Once again Ágústsson
proves that first-class cinematography is now international. LINK

In a spaceship,
in an underwater vessel or in an Arctic or Antarctic station, some
of the best science fiction takes place in an isolated setting. More
precisely, such locations are the convention of the narrower genre
of sci-fi horror, in which remote environments combined with tight,
claustrophobic spaces are perfect for the unleashing of our worst
fears. This is, of course, obvious to any viewer, who recognizes these
are places difficult or impossible to escape or be rescued from. But
more importantly these settings allow for psychological conflicts
that parallel, heighten or even overshadow the genre's typical conflicts
with aliens, sentient computers or supernatural beings.

Take Larry Fessenden's latest film, The Last Winter, which is set
in an Arctic station and follows all the rules of the sci-fi horror
genre, while almost completely leaving out the physical conflict.
Yes, it features a supernatural threat, but it doesn't need one, because
the film works so brilliantly as simply a psychological mood piece.
In most of these kinds of films, the creature or villain is the pay-off
for the audience that seeks some sort of spectacle, or at least some
material baddie to make for a cinematically appropriate, externally
battled climax. In The Last Winter however, the spectacle actually
falls flat because it consists of disappointingly horrible special
effects.

Good thing the spectacle is unnecessary and disregardable, because
otherwise, The Last Winter is an excellent genre film with an honorable
and intelligent global warming message mixed in. At least one critic
has already referred to it as "The Thing meets An Inconvenient
Truth," but that label makes the film seem more lecturing than
it truly is. Instead Fessenden manages to merely touch on the global
warming issue without being heavy-handed or preachy, and he concentrates
primarily on the drama of the characters as they relate to the sparse,
blindingly white landscape.

The station here is in Northern Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge (substituted with Icelandic shooting locations), where an oil
company is looking for places to drill. Like the best of its genre,
The Last Winter features a varied team of experts, each played effectively
by distinguished character actors. There's the headstrong leader,
Ed (Ron Perlman – in the rare normal, human performance), his
more-sensitive yet still conservative second-in-command, Abby (Connie
Britton), the young new recruit, Max (Zach Gilford) and the nutty
mechanic, Motor (Kevin Corrigan). For regional expertise, there are
two Native American teammates, one a quiet, reserved, elder type (Pato
Hoffman) and the other a lovably plump cook/medic (Joanne Shenandoah).

The trouble for the station begins when Max goes missing while out
mapping the territory. When he finally returns, he's not exactly possessed,
but he has an equally mysterious nature about him. At first, he just
seems spooked, while claiming to have seen things out in the snow.
According to him, the land is haunted by the ghosts of the animals
that roamed there eons ago, as in those creatures since turned into
fossil fuels. Then, obsessed with what he supposedly saw, and set
to prove it to the rest of them, he heads out one night with a video
camera and no clothes. The next day he is found frozen to death, with
his eyes pecked out by birds. Slowly other team members start to lose
it, and seemingly non-paranormal yet coincidentally strange accidents
occur. And yes, more people end up dead.

Meanwhile, also staying at the station is a pair of environmental
scientists, James (James LeGross) and his assistant, Elliot (Jamie
Harrold), who cause Ed headaches by pointing out that the weather
is too sporadic and the temperature is rising too exponentially for
the team to ethically continue their work. Despite the duo's clashes
with Ed's ambitions, though, they also are technically working for
the oil company. So, even though James means well and wants to make
an impact, he is replaceable and therefore not too influential. This
somewhat makes Ed and James two sides of the same coin, and neither
of them is really more of a protagonist than the other. What is interesting
about their tension is that Ed is like an aged strong man while James
is like an aged pretty boy, as if they are two passed-over Hollywood
action-hero types who can no longer cut it if faced with a villainous
threat. So, basically they're both screwed as far as whatever supernatural
force might be out there, because it could really care less about
what each man's ideals are.
But let's address the problem of that supernatural force, which eventually
does materialize on screen in the form of some cheap CGI. It is fair
to dismiss the bad-looking apparitions by deciding that they are inconsequential
and maybe even just representative of the bad visions in the minds
of the characters. The great thing about the eerie events in The Last
Winter is that they all could happen under normal circumstances and
with perfectly natural explanations. Like Fessenden's other work,
particularly his almost equally appreciable previous film, Wendigo,
the supernatural is treated as it is typically treated in real life,
as a loose possibility to those who might believe in it, but completely
ignorable to those who can find other, more rational answers.

Fessenden's genius is his ability to balance themes and ideas, like
that of the natural versus supernatural, so that there is tension
and also equilibrium. The Last Winter additionally features this balance
in its dual non-protagonists, as well as in its ability to be both
a sci-fi horror film and a message film. The story compliments and
anchors the intentionally communicated issues (again, Fessenden is
not subtle, but neither is he forceful), and vice versa, with neither
overemphasized.

The Last Winter is very similar to Danny Boyle's Sunshine, another
excellent science fiction film from this year, which was unfortunately
ignored in theaters. It too featured the conventions of the sci-fi
horror genre and it also suffered only from and in its climactic struggle
with a material villain, again unnecessary within the film's context.
But like The Last Winter, Sunshine worked terrifically as a smartly
examined story about the mental capacities of humans put in extreme
environments. The two films are atmospherically so different, but
psychologically so equivalent. I highly recommend them both, maybe
as a double feature. LINK

Check out The Last Winter opening this week. I admit to being a fan
of director’s Larry Fessenden’s artful, eerie, terror
tales (Wendigo, Habit), and his new slice of strangeness takes place
at a remote Alaskan outpost where a team is investigating the readiness
for oil drilling while the drastic climate changes and the increasingly
alarming behavior of the crew suggest that there’s “something
off."

Ron Perlman plays the blustery macho boss desperate to get the project
rolling who locks horns with an ecological investigator (the always
terrific James LeGross). But when mysterious deaths begin to occur
it does seem to suggest something supernatural might be rising from
the earth. I suppose this can be called environmental horror, or An
Inconvenient Spook. But Fessenden does wonders with fluid camerawork
and music creating the mood of isolation and shifting moods of the
crew in this this icy wilderness. When the terror kicks it’s
wonderfully disorienting and creepy. A darkly poetic apocalyptic chiller
that proves “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature."
LINK

Freud described the uncanny as the horror that stems from something
that feels familiar and unfamiliar at once, caused by the return of
something that was concealed or repressed. It's a feeling that courses
through Larry Fessenden's "The Last Winter," which is set
and partly shot in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (The
rest was shot in Iceland.) It also sums up the plot of the movie,
a contemporary gothic thriller about the perils of messing with nature.

The advance team for an oil company waits for temperatures to drop
so that it can start drilling in the formerly protected wildernesss
preserve, but the weather isn't cooperating and the members are getting
cagey. The permafrost is melting, which is making the ice roads unpassable
and releasing into the air all kinds of formerly frozen organisms,
viruses and -- who knows? -- the ghosts of the fearsome creatures
that roamed the Earth until they died and got mulched into fossil
fuels.

The movie opens with a corporate propaganda video that explains that
a "historic vote in Congress" has allowed North Industries
to send an advance team into the wilderness to study the effect of
drilling, bringing us one step closer to energy independence. The
presentation ends with the Orwellian-sounding motto, "Trust,
risk, results," which turns out to double as a to-do list for
the apocalypse.

North's advance team members doesn't radiate quite the level of slick
and can-do competence of the company's promotional materials, however.
In fact, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the scrappy
space truckers of the Nostromo. (Fessenden was going for "Alien"
and John Carpenter's "The Thing," mood-wise, and mission
accomplished.) The camp mechanic, Motor (the lovably off-putting Kevin
Corrigan), spends his days in a cloud of pot smoke; cook Dawn (Joanne
Shenandoah) serves grotesque slop and devours romance novels; scientist
Elliott (Jamie Harrold) pines for home and spends his day writing
e-mails to his mother; young Maxwell (Zach Gilford), whose father
thought he could put his love of the outdoors to use by drilling for
oil in a pristine setting, seems understandably out of sorts; and
the mysterious native Alaskan Lee (Pato Hoffman) does little, says
less but smiles to himself like someone who knows something.

Parked in the frozen wilderness with nothing to do, the team members
begin to sense that something is wrong. Or maybe it's just their guilt
bubbling to the surface. Either way, Maxwell becomes increasingly
unnerved and James Hoffman (James LeGros), the environmental expert
hired by North mainly for PR purposes, spends hours holed up in his
shack, meticulously transforming his temperature log into a dark record
of his terror and confusion. Their trepidation may be inchoate, but
it makes perfect sense. As Maxwell remarks, what is oil but fossils,
plants and animals from millions of years ago? Millions of years'
worth of buried decay combined with repressed guilt. "Why do
we despise the world?" Hoffman writes. "What if the thing
we are here to pull out rose up?"

When Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), the moody, hard-drinking and arrogant
team leader, arrives in the camp bearing booze and cheap fiction,
he finds that his former lover Abby (Connie Britton) and Hoffman (pun
perhaps not intended?) have fallen into a casual relationship built
on wary attraction. Hoffman recommends they cancel the project, but
Ed charges ahead even after Maxwell, his "charge," wanders
off into the night and returns three hours later, transformed.

It's billed as an environmental horror story, but "The Last Winter"
bears all the hallmarks of an ever-popular genre that has always pitted
science, technology and reason against emotion, awe and nature. It
bears all the hallmarks of the gothic: ghosts, death, alienated sexuality,
decay, secrets, madness and, of course, awe and trepidation in the
face of the sublime power of nature. It also accomplishes with a modest
budget and a talented cast what bigger, slicker, gorier contemporary
horror movies rarely do. It taps into a collective dread compounded
by the guilt of our complicity. The scrappy, familiar banality of
Fessenden's vision -- the base camp is a dump, the crew unglamorous,
their mission compromised -- only amps up the visceral dread. You
know these people wouldn't stand a chance against nature if it decided
to fight back against the parasitic virus that's destroying it, and
you know you wouldn't, either.

Speaking of things potentially viral, the film is available on demand
at the same time it opens in theaters, a strategy that gives a modest
movie like "The Last Winter" a better chance of reaching
more people. Yes, thawing is bad for the environment. But as far as
the film landscape goes, the more stuff bubbles up from the cultural
permafrost, the better. LINK

...For now, though, I will focus on the fifth film I saw on that dies
mirabilis, because it is one likeliest to have missed the radar of
even some of the more discriminating festivalgoers. It’s called
The Last Winter, and it’s the latest slice of existential modern
horror from writer-director (and sometimes actor) Larry Fessenden.
I say latest because, though he is hardly a household name, Fessenden
has spent much of the last 15 years putting his richly idiosyncratic
and highly political spin on a series of timeless horror-fantasy myths.
Indeed, it is often by virtue of what Fessenden does that we come
to understand why those age-old scary stories have lost none of their
creepy resonance over time. In No Telling (1991), Fessenden used the
basic architecture of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a means
of weighing in on the debates over animal testing and the morality
of science. In the Independent Spirit Award-winning Habit (1997),
vampirism stood as a metaphor for dependency — chemical and
emotional — and the alienation of modern life in the big city.
And in Wendigo (2001) — Fessenden’s best-known film to
date — the titular creature may be a werewolf-like Native American
spirit, but the real force wreaking havoc on its characters’
lives is the clash between the ancient and the modern, between “civilized”
man and his primal, animalistic nature.

These are not traditional monster movies by a long shot. Rather, like
George Romero (whose own deconstructionist vampire movie, Martin,
predates Habit by two decades), Fessenden is interested most in the
collision of real and imagined horrors, and in the human impulse to
fashion myths and legends as a way of giving meaning to a fundamentally
shapeless world. The Last Winter is certainly no exception —
much to the dismay, I suspect, of some of the clearly mystified acquisitions
and distributions executives who wandered into the movie’s Toronto
press screening, clearly lured by the promises of “ghost story”
and “supernatural horror” proffered by the description
in the festival catalogue.

Set in remote Alaska, the film concerns an American oil company’s
top-secret drilling project, designed to bring “energy independence”
to the American people while, quite possibly, wreaking havoc on the
delicate environment of the Arctic tundra. Not that such warnings
(most of them issued by a visiting scientist played by James Le Gros)
do much to deter the drilling team’s blustery leader (an excellent
Ron Perlman) from blasting ahead with the project. Until, that is,
some unseen, primordial force seems to bubble up from the ground along
with that black gold, infecting everyone and everything with which
it comes into contact. Could it be the spirit of the Wendigo yet again?
Perhaps. But as usual in a Fessenden film, in The Last Winter mankind
is its own worst enemy.

Filmed in Iceland in breathtaking 35mm widescreen, The Last Winter
is Fessenden’s biggest and most “professional” production
to date, but in making that leap, the filmmaker has in no way compromised
his artistic integrity. True to form, the movie is more about disquieting
mood and serenely creepy atmosphere than about slam-bang action or
shock-horror jolts. When people start to die, the survivors don’t
run around screaming in a hysterical panic, but rather rationally
and intelligently weigh their options. And the final, apocalyptic
moments are presented less as a “twist” than as the inevitable.
The Last Winter won’t create much “buzz” in the
industry press and won’t win many fans among those who place
the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But
this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about
the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet. Oh, and
it’s also scary as fuck. Link

Off limits for development until a recent congressional decision,
the Wildlife Refuge's oil reserves are largely an unknown quantity:
The only effort was ever made to assess the situation was back in
1986, when the Kick Corp sank a test well that was immediately sealed.
Now mega-corporation North Industries has established a team in the
area and charged gruff, macho company man Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman)
with clearing the way to move in heavy drilling equipment. This being
the 21st century, the North Industry crew is accompanied by environmental
expert James Hoffman (James LeGros) and his assistant, Elliot Taylor
(James Harrold), who must assess the impact of the company's plans
before construction can proceed. Pollack and Hoffman clash immediately,
and not just over their diametrically opposed points of view about
wilderness development, the energy crisis and global warming: While
Pollack was a away on a five-week trip to corporate headquarters,
Hoffman hooked up with Pollack's girl, Abby (Connie Britton). The
atmosphere is already explosive when junior team member Maxwell (Zack
Gilford) disappears for several hours and returns traumatized by something
he can't or won't describe. Isolated and spooked, the team members
succumb to a sense of creeping anxiety that turns to paranoia and,
inevitably, violence.

Fessenden's claustrophobic thriller, shot in Alaska and Iceland, inevitably
recalls antecedents John Carpenters THE THING (1982) , the first-season
X-Files episode "Ice" and, of course, ALIEN (1979), with
its blue-collar team of working stiffs thrown to the wolves by their
uncaring corporate masters. Neither Pollack nor Hoffman is as straightforward
a character as he first appears, and the film's escalating anxiety
is rooted as much in the characters' subtle, thorny relationships
as fear of monsters and madmen. Fessenden consistently ignores contemporary
trends in fright films; his brand of horror unfolds at the intersection
of myth and modern-day malaise and gets there by way of a slow, excruciating
build up rather than a series of short, sharp shocks. And if the film's
11th-hour CGI effects aren't entirely convincing, the notion that
oil itself is haunted by the restless spirit of every once-living
thing that time reduced and mingled into the earth's black blood throws
off a primordial chill. LINK

Larry Fessenden
has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's
a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its
use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle
it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that
if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about
Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual
in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last Winter
unfurls at an Alaskan outpost, where the blustery Pollack (Ron Perlman,
delivering another perfectly-metered performance) has docked hoping
to kick-start stalled plans to drill for oil. He's pitted against
environmental scientist Hoffman (James Le Gros), with whom his former
girlfriend Abby (the lovely Connie Britton) has fallen into bed, giving
Fessenden ample opportunity to exploit the alpha-male subtext of many
a red state/blue state conflict. In fact, the Bush/Gore allegory is
so compelling in and of itself that, while I wouldn't begrudge the
picture its horror elements (Fessenden is the genre fan's salvation,
after all), with supernatural as opposed to psychological forces taking
out the team, The Last Winter builds to an apocalypse whose nihilism
suggests equivocation. Too, the picture is kind of perched, teeter-totter-like,
on a shocking Blair Witch set-piece, never to reach its lofty heights
again. Still and all, an elegiac piece of filmmaking that transcends
cheap thrills in each of its onscreen casualties; I'd love to see
Fessenden try his hand at a war movie. Link

Horror is the
most overburdened genre in existence, weighed down with so much symbolic,
political, and sociological portent that it’s a marvel when a
film can actually get down to the business of being scary. While unpretentious
and well-crafted efforts like Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn fall by
the wayside, the latest offerings from each newly minted horror “auteur”
come with allegory locked firmly in place for critical exegesis, while
any actual insight into their ostensible “real” topic is
precisely nil. This isn’t to say that horror films are obliged
to stay out of the real world and within their own supposed generic
boundaries—rather that an attempt to address the real world must
be made intrinsic to those boundaries, a part of the film rather than
an imposed reading.

Larry Fessenden is a self-confessed horror filmmaker, and not only perhaps
the greatest one working today—his potential rivals being Kiyoshi
Kurosawa and Bong Joon-ho—but also the most pointedly political,
emotionally invested, and unguardedly honest. Unlike his dissembling
contemporaries, his films are defiantly about what they are about. Rather
than the comfortable “archetypes” with which so many horror
faux-teurs skim across any real investment in their material, Fessenden
always has an actual subject, whether it’s the self-destruction
of addiction in Habit or the familial breakdown of Wendigo, and it’s
from these subjects that the atmosphere and fright emanate. Fessenden
is not making art movies (or political tracts) in horror-film clothing,
but employing the genre to break open the dread at the heart of his
subjects, to give their terrifying formlessness a transitory form.

In The Last Winter, his most ambitious and masterful film thus far,
he deliberately pushes the capabilities of cinematic representation
to incarnate that unimaginable fear. The familiar scenario—an
oil-drilling team in Alaska suddenly confronted by strange atmospheric
conditions and various ghostly presences circling their camp—and
familiar character types—he-man foreman (Ron Perlman), sensitive,
bearded scientist (James LeGros), smart and tough woman caught between
them (Connie Britton), the grubby, bearded, talkative mechanic, inevitably
named Motor (Kevin Corrigan)—promises a better-or-worse rerun
of familiar pleasures, with a trendy overlay of environmental doomsaying.
But Fessenden continually undercuts both the expected progression of
shocks—stifling or cutting short the expectedly scary bits and
introducing jagged rhythms and unsettling discrepancies into what should
be the rest periods between scares—and the comfy, audience-flattering
“higher” thematic content. Fessenden is not praising our
sharpness in divining the “real” subject of his film beneath
the generic trappings. He is using those trappings to their fullest
in order to burst through them, penetrating our distanced genre connoisseurship
and striking us at our most naked, vulnerable, fearful point: the very
real possibility of human extinction buried beneath the endless “debate”
over irreversible ecological breakdown.

This must be made clear: The Last Winter is not an allegory of ecological
apocalypse, but an envisioning of it. While its plot outline fits it
snugly into the eco-horror/revenge-of-nature subgenre, it allows the
audience no distancing from its truly terrifying topic. Hopelessness
has been made just another exploitable trope in the horror genre, a
cheap shock for the final reel (see the remade Dawn of the Dead or the
recent, execrable 28 Weeks Later); for Fessenden, it is the shaping
force of his film. Not that he is in any way a nihilist: with his warmly
drawn characters, he’s the most humanistic of horror filmmakers,
if that’s not a contradiction in terms. The unavoidable fates
that befall his characters in The Last Winter are both tragic and deserved.
His people are not merely unlucky representatives of humanity arbitrarily
chosen for nature’s punishment, they are members of humanity whose
own actions and thoughts, however ill- or well-intentioned, have contributed
to the destruction being unleashed from within the much-abused earth.
And the forms that destruction takes are frightening not only because
they are expertly and unnervingly directed by Fessenden, but because
they increasingly become disconnected from any discernible “rules”—working
within the boundaries of genre, they begin to move beyond the safety
afforded the viewer therein. What is inexplicable to the characters
should by all rights be explicable to us, but for one of the few times
in horror cinema, we are presented with a situation where we honestly
don’t know what to expect next. And combined with the gathering
portents of a horrible revelation to come, we are faced with a situation
both fearful and hopeful: the chance that we might see something genuinely
new, a rarity not just for horror cinema but any cinema.

There are thus two levels of suspense created and maintained throughout
The Last Winter. The first is Fessenden’s, in his often brilliant
command of mood, atmosphere, and timing; the second is ours, as we wonder,
hope, that the revelation can possibly equal the masterful build-up
Fessenden has given it. To put it simply, it doesn’t. But the
gonzo insanity of the last ten minutes, so drastically breaking with
the slow, gathering dread that preceded it, almost seems a humble confession
on the director’s part: a confession that nothing he puts on the
screen could possibly be more frightening than the reality he’s
concerned with. The Last Winter ultimately isn’t “satisfying”
because there is no real-world satisfaction for what it speaks of. This
horror cannot be contained in our stories or our images. It has a logic
of its own so alien to ours that even our best attempts to decipher
it must fail, and our knowledge be limited to an awareness of its implacable
approach. Hoots and jeers might accompany the finale of The Last Winter,
but they’re only a coping mechanism for the terrible truth it
uncovers—what it knows about that which is impossible to know.Link

Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) concludes with a scene in which
a small boy faces down a pair of boots left sitting in a hospital
corridor. The boots belonged to his father who has just died on the
operating table, the victim of a senseless tragedy perpetrated by
a stranger; they’ve been absent-mindedly dropped on the ground
by his wife whose grief precludes her from noticing her son languishing
at the other end of the hallway. As Fessenden cuts between the boy,
stock-still and tiny beneath the high ceiling, and the forlorn, abandoned
footwear, a plangent visual metaphor emerges: this small child suddenly
has some very big shoes to fill.
It’s solemn stuff for a movie named for—and featuring
several jarring intrusions by—an ominous bi-pedal Native American
deer-spirit. But Fessenden’s cinema is distinguished by the
various miraculous equilibriums it sustains, precarious but increasingly
sure-footed balancing acts between seemingly exclusive concepts: high-concept
and low-budget, abstraction and immediacy, the shopworn and the visionary.
No Telling (1991) clumsily but ambitiously re-framed the Frankenstein
story through the lens of the animal-rights debate, while Habit (1997)
unravelled the bleak tale of a disheveled teetotaler (played by Fessenden
himself in a twitchy tour-de-force) whose new girlfriend just might
be a vampire. The shoestring tangle of big themes (scientific progress
vs. cruelty in No Telling, the monstrousness of addiction and the
spectre of AIDS in Habit) and earnest B-movie craftsmanship in these
films found refinement in Wendigo, an emotional end-of-childhood narrative
(adapted from a short story by Algernon Blackwood) augmented by fluid
camerawork, neatly integrated low-fi special-effects, and a fascinating
eco-horror subtext—the titular creature as a manifestation of
our fragile ecosystem’s wrath.

The wendigo makes a return appearance of sorts in Fessenden’s
astonishing new film The Last Winter. While it’s not technically
a sequel, there’s little doubt that the malevolent entities
menacing the film’s principals—a corporate-backed deep-drilling
crew trolling for oil beneath the pristine white expanse of Alaska’s
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—share a kinship with said antlered
phantom. In both cases, the creatures target human beings who have
encroached on and despoiled their turf, but where Wendigo’s
monster was ultimately revealed to be a protector of sorts (its lone
victim being a remorseless backwoods hunter with human and animal
deaths on his conscience), the things that show up in the last movement
of The Last Winter boast dauntingly larger—even apocalyptic—appetites.

Like Bong Joon-ho’s marvelous (if more straightforward) The
Host, The Last Winter is an environmental horror movie in which our
excesses come home to roost: Hell hath no fury like Mother Nature
scorned. It begins as a careful inventory of horror-movie clichés
(an isolated, fractious group warding off frostbite, paranoia, and
possible ghosts; shades of John Carpenter’s version of The Thing
[1982] and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining [1980]) and evolves—methodically
and brilliantly—into a dead-serious and deeply distressing End
of Days saga. The pervasive sense of head-hung melancholy suggests
Kurosawa Kiyoshi, except that Fessenden isn’t dealing in technophobic
vagaries. The Last Winter addresses issues of global warming and environmental
ruin without cloaking them in allegory—it’s hard to imagine
a more direct assessment of the horrors that will emerge out of our
failed stewardship of the planet.

The gale-force denouement would be irrelevant, however, were the build-up
not so expertly handled: Fessenden’s technique, prone previously
to fits and starts, has never seemed so assured. As in Wendigo, the
director displays a real mastery for wintry environs: the camera swirls
around the drillers’ lonely outpost on the same weightless trajectory
as the snow itself. Inside, the major personalities are quickly established:
Pollack (Ron Perlman) is the team leader, his alpha-male pissing act
(he punctuates every other sentence with “goddamnit”)
fortified by a bear-like bulk and the lean, hard lines of his face.
Next on the food chain is Abby (Connie Britton), Pollack’s unofficial
right-hand woman and occasional lover. At the low end of the pecking
order—after a few vividly gruff veterans—is Hoffman (James
LeGros) a pasty, weak-chinned eco-watchdog who’s come to Alaska
to conduct an environmental-impact study.

That’s too many syllables for Pollack, whose rugged-individualist
bravado smartly conceals a neutered company man’s lack of imagination.
Pollack doesn’t want to hear about Hoffman’s reservations,
but when things start going weird—and to Fessenden’s credit,
it happens very gradually—there comes a point where he has no
choice but to deviate from his rigorous battle plan. The conflicts
are myriad: there’s the war of attrition between Pollack and
Hoffman; the sexual gamesmanship of Abby (who shacks up with Hoffman
on the sly but remains caught between the two men); the crew’s
difficulties with their unusually harsh environs; and Hoffman’s
frustrating internal conflict. He knows that something is wrong—the
weather is out of whack, and seems to be contributing to the mental
strife (sleeplessness, hallucinations, somnambulism) of his colleagues—but
his inability to articulate this admittedly amorphous threat, or to
really stand up to the domineering Hoffman, renders him impotent,
frantically scrawling out his fears in a notebook as things fall apart.

There is a point at which The Last Winter shifts from a story about
ideological intractability and cold-addled stir-craziness into a genuine
genre piece: suffice it to say that it’s one of the scariest
scenes in recent memory, possibly the best prepared and delivered
shock of Fessenden’s career. And yet the film never loses its
grasp on its characters—the groups’ reactions to the escalating
strangeness are uncommonly intelligent (Pollack is obstinate, but
not stupid, to Perlman’s credit ), and the individuals are differentiated
enough that what happens to them matters to us. There are no easy
victims in Fessenden’s films; each loss is felt, and felt hard.

It is this quality of feeling that distinguishes The Last Winter not
only from the current crop of sado-porn horror films, but from most
eco-scare pictures, as well: the gorgeous abstraction of Jennifer
Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes and the pointed finger-wagging
of An Inconvenient Truth are both valid approaches to an unthinkably
terrifying subject, but neither film really qualifies as an emotional
experience. The Last Winter fairly tingles with empathy—for
its autonomous but doomed characters, for the wounded Earth spirits
that pursue them, and for our battered, scooped-out planet. Wendigo
introduced the idea of a rapacious demon with an insatiable appetite
(“The bigger it gets, the hungrier it gets”), hinting
that the carnivore in question was, in fact us. The Last Winter confirms
this postulation, and without a trace of glib, told-you-so smugness.
“We can’t go home again,” reads one of Hoffman’s
notebook scribbles. It’s a familiar sentiment, but completely
devastating in this particular context: this is a film about the present
devouring the future.

There is also a key shot in The Last Winter involving a pair of boots.
But where Wendigo (explicitly referenced again in a jaw-dropping late
shot of a house far away from the main action) suggested that the
shoes, and the attendant responsibilities attached to them, might
be capably filled by an approaching successor. This time out, the
owner is moving inexorably in the other direction, towards oblivion.
It’s bad enough to admit that we’ve burdened the next
generation with salvaging the mess we’ve made of our only home;
what’s worse—and what The Last Winter, in its towering,
inconsolable sadness, understands —is that they might never
get the chance to pick up the slack. Link

Something strange
is happening in the remote arctic plains of Alaska. It seems global
warming is doing more than simply melting the glaciers and ice caps
– something long frozen into the tundra is being liberated to
mankind’s collective detriment. As such, this is a very timely
horror film with its ominous metaphorical connection to global warming.

The underlying framework harkens back to The Thing, with its motley
crew of oil company workers stationed out in the middle of wintry
nowhere, small airplane access only. Their workstation is your standard
functional ice station setup, a communal mess hall, an airplane and
snowcat hanger and small quarters for the individual men and women
working there. All is hunky dory at first as oil-man-in-charge Ed
Pollack (Pearlman) arrives with fresh stocks of food, booze, and smokes.
But one of his workers, James Hoffman (LeGros) has a hidden agenda
– his environmental concerns have brought him here in the guise
of an oil worker, when in fact he wants anything but further drilling
or development.

Add in the fact that Hoffman’s character is banging Pollack’s
on-site former flame and you have a relationship that isn’t
exactly what you’d call amicable. Thankfully, Fessenden doesn’t
pour on the romance or resort to the clichés of "love
conquers all", this dynamic plays out with subtlety and convincing
interpersonal tension.

The scary stuff in this story really creeps in gradually – those
expecting a sudden horrific alien swarm or terrified flamethrower
battles with a giant hulking insectoid beast will likely be disappointed.
The terror impetus here is more a force than anything else. It does
eventually rear its multiple heads later on in a visually impressive
if not overly heart stopping way. But the real enemy is mankind –
as the greedy push to suck the land dry gathers more steam, the eerie
changes to the collective of psyche of the workers gets more pronounced,
and this doesn’t appear to be a strictly localized phenomenon.

Fessenden does a good job of keeping the menace just out of our reach,
the performances are great and the visual feel makes the very most
out of the minimal aesthetic of the arctic plain. As greater obstacles
face our foes, panic sets in effectively, more like how it would actually
be than outright sudden hysteria. In a critical bad move by Pollack
and Hoffman, they end up stranded miles from the nearest station or
northern community, and as they notice the oil leaking from their
snowmobiles you get a real sense of dread for their circumstances
with only 3 hours of daylight in front them to travel on foot.

But ultimately, even though it’s a well crafted and very well
acted film, the end result left me a little cold. Its ambiguity might
ratchet up the fear centers in some viewer’s minds, but when
it’s this straightforwardly and plausibly presented of a scare
tale I prefer to have things wrapped up in a crystal clear manner.
And there are some absurd plausibility gaps – I don’t
believe, for example, that you can plunge over your head into an arctic
stream and dry yourself and your snowsuit off outside with no shelter
and a small twig fire.

But it’s still a good movie and worth seeing. Having not seen
Wendigo or other films by Larry Fessenden, I’m curious now as
he gets a lot of love in the horror scene. If you can see the film
with Mr. Fessenden hosting it, go for it – he’s an entertaining
fellow with his head screwed on right. I’m giving this 3 daggers
out of 5, which definitely would have been 4 had the plot come to
a more specific conclusion, but that’s a personal preference
more than a slight against the movie. Other people I watched it with
didn’t have this qualm. Keep that in mind and if you’re
Fessenden fan already then definitely check out The Last Winter. Link

No one would mistake
Larry Fessenden's independent horror project--encompassing films such
as "Habit," "Wendigo," and now "The Last
Winter"--as anything other than ambitious; yet this auteur certainly
proves divisive among viewers. One needs to slough off expectations
of what a "horror film" is supposed to deliver in order
to get on his wavelength; naturally many will not be willing to do
so, since, like his askew creature-feature "Wendigo," "The
Last Winter" moves back and forth between subtle atmospherics
and thudding exposition, and teases its audience with scares that
often never come. It would be overstating things a bit to say that
Fessenden is seriously challenging the rules of horror (there's nothing
particularly radical in his narratives), but he does ask his audience
to focus on character, environment, and allegory, which make his films
somewhat anomalous.

"The Last
Winter" uses similar strategies and effects as "Wendigo,"
but to far more satisfying ends. An eco-horror tale that isn't afraid
to promise utter bleakness, Fessenden uses the wintry "Who Goes
There?" set-up of John Carpenter's "The Thing" and
then supplants its central conceit (outer-space aliens entering the
human blood stream) with something far more alienating for being all
too close: nature itself enacting blood-thirsty vengeance--more terrifying
because it is of this world. "The Last Winter" is more mournful
than alarmist in its environmental distress, and ultimately provides
a fatalistic contrast to the pervasive "what you can do to help"
global warming documentaries: In "The Last Winter," sadly,
Fessenden acknowledges not only futility but also awe in the face
of imminent catastrophe.

In the pristine
blankness of the Northern Alaskan tundra, snow-white yet rapidly melting,
a crew is sent to scout for oil resources, led by the blustery Ed
Pollack (Ron Perlman), an iron-jawed conservative looking out for
corporate interests who's none too pleased by the omnipresence of
tagalong environmentalist Hoffman (James LeGros). Fessenden takes
way too much time sketching the political and personal differences
between Perlman's granite reserve and LeGros's befuddled do-goodism,
and at times, the film threatens to crumble under an endless litany
of musty macho tete-a-tetes. The film is entirely too masculine, in
fact, and the only strong female crew member, Connie Britton's Abby,
has slept with both Pollack and Hoffman, which establishes her as
little more than a stock device and another reason for the men's bitter
disputes.

Yet as often as
the film trades in character types, it also neutralizes them by situating
them within ambiguous, ruminative spaces. The crew encounters a strong
life force (wonderfully captured in camerawork that sails on gusts
of wind) that seemingly turns them against themselves and each other,
though in always disquietingly melancholy rather than startling ways.
So strong is the sense of civil decline within this microcosm that
it comes as quite a disappointment when, at his climax, Fessenden
resorts to some frightfully unscary "Wendigo"-cribbed tricks.
Although it's somewhat unfair to call the director out for simply
seeing his vision through to a concrete ending, one still wishes he
had trusted the nighttime photography and elegant sound design to
carry the film. Yet the film's unspoken central question--did we betray
nature or did nature betray us?--is provocative enough to make his
missteps vanish like melted footprints in the snow. Link

You know, it’s
not often that a critic gets to watch the birth of a new subgenre.
Usually these things only become evident in retrospect. But I think
that The Last Winter is in the vanguard of a whole new type of horror
picture.

Eco-horror - it’s the coming thing.

Let’s be clear. I don’t mean the old nature-amok subgenre
like Grizzly or Piranha where a particular species was selected to
be fiercer and/or larger than it is normally and then just set free
to rampage across the screen and most of the cast. No, eco-horror
is a whole new subgenre that owes as much to An Inconvenient Truth
as it does to Jaws or Phase IV.

The Last Winter may or may not be the first eco-horror film, but it’s
the first one I have seen. And I would venture to suggest that, unless
this particular subgenre turns out to be absolutely fantastic through
and through, this will ultimately be regarded as one of the best eco-horror
films. Larry Fessenden’s latest film sets the bar very high
indeed.
An opening corporate video explains that an attempt to drill an oil
well in an Alaskan wildlife reserve many years ago was abandoned,
but that now North Oil are back for another try. A small group of
men and women are already out in the snowy wilderness, measuring and
marking out the area before an ‘ice road’ is constructed
to the location. They’re shacked up in a collection of Portakabins
and they’re only link to the outside world is a radio telephone
and occasional visits from a light aircraft, which drops off team
leader Pollack after he has spent five weeks back at company headquarters.

Pollack is played by the world’s busiest actor, Ron Perlman,
who is just in everything. I mean, the Inaccurate Movie Database already
lists 21 other credits since this! To be fair, that includes four
animated Hellboy features, an animated Conan feature, a Hellboy video
game etc but still there’s things like Hellboy 2 and The Mutant
Chronicles (he was on set when I visited but wasn’t in the mood
for interviews alas). I mean: Star Trek: Nemesis, Blade II, Scooby-Doo,
Batman, Titan AE, The Outer Limits, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died,
City of Lost Children. It’s hard to find something cool this
guy hasn’t done in some respect. Hmm, didn’t know he was
in Police Academy 7, I must admit...
In opposition to Pollack is Hoffman (James LeGros: Phantasm II, Destiny
Turns on the Radio), one of two ecologists or ‘greenies’
which North are required to have on site, monitoring the environmental
impact of the work. So immediately there’s conflict - conflict
which is not helped by Pollack’s discovery that, while he was
back at North HQ, Hoffman has not only joined the team he has also
hitched up with Abby (Connie Britton: Spin City, plus recurring roles
on The West Wing and 24), a female worker who had previously been
keeping Pollack warm at night.

This is conflict which builds. Initially Pollack is welcoming, if
naturally wary, and everyone joins in a ‘welcome back’
meal and a game of American football outside on the ice. Pollack is
a company man and it would have been very easy to paint him as a bastard,
a sort of blue-collar Paul-Reiser-in-Aliens, but he has an agenda
based on his own values, his own belief that the fuel reserves as
yet untapped in Alaska will make the world a better place, not a worse
one.

The rest of the team are interesting but not caricatures and we get
to know them slowly over the next 50 minutes or so.

Because it is only halfway through this 101-minute film that anything
really scary happens, and then only very, very briefly. That might
sound like a long build-up but that’s just what it is: a build-up.
The feeling that something is awry up there in the snow increases
gradually. The vast expanses can do strange things to a person’s
mind, you can see illusions, you can start to feel a little strange.

Odd winds from nowhere, curious feelings, half-seen images - there’s
nothing overtly supernatural. In fact everything that happens seems
to be natural and perhaps that’s part of the film’s great
strength. Because this isn’t a monster movie. The monster, if
there is one, is nature itself. Not animals - we never see any animals
except a few crows - but the world, the snow, the planet, the ice,
the cold air and the Northern Lights. And if it is a monster, it’s
Frankenstein’s monster, not in the sense of being man-made but
in its pitiful, victimised defence of itself. It’s a monster
that can be pushed so far and then must lash out at its attackers.

Describing too much of the plot would spoil a film that I really,
really don’t want to spoil for you. But I can say that from
the halfway mark, things start to get worse for the team and people
start dying. And things get worse and worse and they have so much
empty space around them they have nowhere to go. Simmering at the
heart of this is the antipathetic relationship between Pollack and
Hoffman which never boils over into rage. Towards the end, the two
must work together and it would have been easy for the film to fall
into a simplistic storyline about people learning to understand other
folks’ views - but this never happens. Fessenden’s marvellous
script and direction ensures that these characters stay three-dimensional
and their relationships remain believable.

The Last Winter is a sort of edgewhere movie, balanced on that precarious
border between reality and fantasy. There are parts of the film where
it’s clear that what is happening is inside somebody’s
head - psychological horror. There are other parts where it seem reasonably
clear that some genuine physical phenomenon has occurred, one that
should not have done so - supernatural horror. These two elements
both contradict and complement each other and a third element is present
too: scientific horror. As Hoffman tries to understand why the permafrost
is melting, why it’s warm enough in Alaska for rain, the horror
of what humanity is doing to the planet - and what the planet may
do back - becomes the ultimate driving force behind the film’s
emotional push.

Fessenden’s last couple of films, Habit and Wendigo (someone
mentions a Wendigo in this one) were written solo but for this script
he has teamed up with Robert Leaver, a “New York based writer,
poet and teacher” who has two short documentaries to his credit,
The Session and Oil and Water (although these are not mention in The
Last Winter’s publicity for some reason). Fessenden, whose acting
credits include Session 9, The Roost and Cabin Fever 2, has a cameo
in an aeroplane on its way to visit the base.
The frankly flawless cast also includes Kevin Corrigan (True Romance,
Bad Boys), Jamie Harrold (Erin Brockovich, Kingdom Hospital), Zach
Gilford (Rise: Blood Hunter) and Grammy-winning Native American singer-songwriter
Joanne Shenandoah. But possibly the finest member of the cast is the
location which is as much a character as New York in a Woody Allen
movie. Full credit for this has to go to the stunning cinematography
of G Magni Agustsson who works wonders with not just the vast, widescreen
emptiness but also the lived-in confines of the base.

Agustsson is Icelandic and indeed much of the film was shot in Iceland.
Variety actually lists the film as a US-Icelandic co-production and
I’m prepared to go along with that unless proven otherwise.
Producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte also produced Wendigo as well as films
like Laurel Canyon and Mysterious Skin. Executive producer Sigurjon
Sighvatsson’s previous credits include Wild at Heart, In Bed
with Madonna, Candyman I and II, Kalifornia, Lord of Illusions and
Arlington Road. Stefan Jorgen, who contributed the make-up effects,
also did make-up for Lazy Town! Glenn McQuaid provided the visual
effects. Douglas Buck (Cutting Moments) shot a Making Of which is
sadly missing from the vanilla UK release.

If you want scary monsters and /or gallons of blood and/or a roller-coaster
ride then you’re looking at the wrong film. This may be Fessenden’s
most accessible film to date but it’s still not obviously commercial
(note the lack of attractive young people in the cast, for example).
But if you want a powerful, unnerving, original, beautifully constructed
slice of disturbing, thought-provoking eco-horror, here it is.Link

SCREENED AT THE
2007 FANTASIA FESTIVAL: It would be completely wrong of me spoil the
thing in "The Last Winter" that made me go from thinking
it was a nice little "isolated area (and maybe something else)
starts messing with people" horror movie to lapping it up like
a ten year old boy whose dreams have just been answered. Since I find
myself unable to finish writing this until I let it out, allow me
one small tease: G____ d________!

It's a slow burn before we get to them. North Industries has just
received Congressional approval to start drilling for oil in Alaska;
we're ominously informed that an exploratory well was drilled twenty
years ago but abandoned. Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) has just flown out
to get things on schedule, only to find his ex-girlfriend Abby Sellers
(Connie Britton) sleeping with the head environmental impact monitor,
James Hoffman (James LeGros). He's warning of environmental catastrophe,
of course, but the rising temperature is making it difficult to build
the ice road needed to get equipment out there. Also on the base are
Hoffman's assistant Elliot Jenkins (Jamie Harrold), "Motor"
the mechanic (Kevin Corrigan), Inuit employees Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah)
and Lee (Pato Hoffman), along with Maxwell McKinder (Zach Gilford).
Maxwell is starting to get "big-eye" from the endless white
landscape anyway, but comes back from a trip to see the old test well
even more unsteady.

The first half of the movie is set-up, but writer/director Larry Fessenden
spends it more on establishing character relationships than anything
else. We get to see which characters get along and which don't, for
reasons both personal and political. The opening exposition is a little
heavy-handed, but it's the quickest way to get us up to speed on what
we need to know without wasting a whole lot of time, and it does kind
of prime us to treat it like a horror movie: Aside from the ominous
depiction of the station's isolation (which would feel right at home
in The Thing), the first half hour could seem like it was laying the
groundwork for an "evil ex" movie, an issue-oriented drama,
or, (shiver!) some terrible combination of the two. A little foreshadowing
that the movie might wind up going in a paranormal direction keeps
what happens later from being an unwelcome surprise.

There's an environmental message to the movie, of course, although
none of the characters are so crass to suggest that this is what man
deserves for attempting to exploit the last pristine place on Earth.
Fessenden does make clever use of the "love triangle", though,
as Pollack and Hoffman spend a great deal of the movie vying for Abby's
support, with Hoffman's romantic ideals pulling her one way while
Pollack pulls her the other less through a personal relationship than
the fact that he represents her job and other practical things. There
are scenes where Pollack literally can't see the things that Hoffman
does, and others where we get the impression that Hoffman may be crossing
the line from passionate researcher to Gaia-worshiping fanatic. For
a movie that does, in a way, boil down to "screwing with mother
nature will probably get you killed", it's got a fairly even-handed
method of presenting the issue to the audience.

Once things start taking turns for the weird, the movie becomes a
lot of fun. Fessenden and his co-writer Robert Leaver have a blast
throwing things at the audience with little or no warning; the situation
can go from "we're in trouble" to "we're really, really
screwed" in a moment. It's not just the danger level that changes,
either; the first act gets the audience thinking in terms of this
smallish, psychological story, and then, wham!, it's a movie where
catastrophic things can happen. Fessenden favors the creepy over the
disgusting, although there's a bit of that - ravens apparently find
eyeballs delicious, although it's them hanging around and growing
in number that is really unnerving. The visual effects are well-done,
and the writers show a knack for working in authentic-sounding jargon
without making the film incomprehensible. Fessenden also mixes stock
footage of oil-related disasters in to highlight what dangerous stuff
this is even before the paranormal occurs.
The performances are mostly pretty darn good: Connie Britton's Abby
anchors the movie, keeping the other characters from drifting toward
extremes, but is capable and relatable in her own right. LeGros hits
a nice balance as Hoffman; his tendency toward being sanctimonious
plays as a character flaw but not a crippling one. Ron Perlman mostly
strikes the right notes as Pollack, although I think both he and the
writers have a difficult time making the character a conservative
jerk without also making him a total strawman jerk. It's good that
they play him more as a guy who worked his way up from actual operations
rather than a clueless east-coast exec, so that he has some credibility.

Fessenden doesn't let credibility get in the way of cool too much,
though - yeah, he does a good job of making climate change scary without
making claims sound wildly exaggerated, but he hasn't just made a
message movie - he's made one that has a great deal of dangerous fun
with just what depending on oil really is. Link

In The Last Winter, Fessenden’s environmentally conscious supernatural
disaster movie, a team of oil specialists are preparing for a drilling
site in Alaska when nature seemingly begins to run homicidal. Fessenden
imbues the natural-disaster genre with an ambiguity that neither preaches
environmental awareness nor contents itself with the spectacle of
nature’s special effects-ridden wrath (unlike Twister, Volcano
or any of its late-90s brethren). There’s an ethereal evil akin
to J-Horror, a mood that spells disaster without actually spelling
it out, leaving much interpretation open to the spectator. Fessenden’s
previous two films, the vampire story Habit and the wintry, mythological
Wendigo, were characterized by strong naturalistic tendencies. The
horrors were implicit and stunningly realistic, and the films seemed
more character- than genre-studies. Fessenden’s latest, The
Last Winter, is decidedly more accessible and mainstream, but it still
possesses a fierce realism and intimacy that often lack Hollywood
horror flicks. Link

A strange wind
sweeps through the warming Alaskan tundra, where a team is toiling
to exploit oil resources. As in every good B-horror movie, what is
first mistaken for a series of coincidences slowly reveals itself
to be the work of a malevolent, shapeless force that transforms this
already-conflicted group into a mass of raving, murderous lunatics.
As a surveyor (James LeGros) agonizes over this menace — as
well as about global warming — the team's leader (Ron Perlman)
bucks at any cause that might compromise his business agenda. The
Last Winter is a Twin Peaks-esque slash-and-gasher whose true monster
is the environmental chaos wreaked by human greed and carelessness.
(LR) LINK

Low-budget horror
auteur Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has a truly clever set-up
for his latest shiverfest. Climate change is making life difficult
for a group of blue-collar types (think Alien and especially The Thing)
working to get oil out of the Alaskan wilderness by melting the ice
roads and thawing the frozen tundra, making both unsafe for trucks.
As the film progresses, the crew is slowly driven insane, either by
"sour gas" being released out of the softening ground, or
by some kind of vengeful earth-spirit that's been stirred up by exploitation
of the area's natural resources. It's a global-warming horror movie.

The low-key production gets a boost from Fessenden's skill working
with his lead actors. The typically expert Ron Perlman plays Ed Pollack,
a gruff leader who's impatient with the tree-hugging outsider (James
LeGros) who's on site to monitor the project's environmental impact
(and, not incidentally, to sleep with Pollack's former girlfriend);
the story really comes alive after disaster strikes the compound and
those two head out on their own to try to summon help. The balance
of the picture is suffused with an impressive chilliness, and a few
genuinely disturbing images, but the narrative is largely (perhaps
deliberately) undeveloped, with the result that much of the violent
action feels random and obligatory.

The decision to shoot in Iceland helps give this warm winter a look
and feel all its own, but Fessenden's ambition ultimately butts heads
with his budget -- especially when he resorts to CG work in the final
reels. The Last Winter is an intriguing film, and one that's easy
to admire for its use of old-school character development and a small-scale
sense of dread, but it never feels fully realized. It's the rare case
where I might actually look forward to a more generously budgeted
remake. (Upgraded a notch for staying power.) B- LINK

"The
Last Winter": Did Dick Cheney's energy task force know about
the spectral caribou?

Contemporary American
horror movies are so not worth watching, for the most part, that I'm
tempted to lavish more praise on Larry Fessenden (maker of 2001's
"Wendigo" and the awesome mid-'90s vampire flick "Habit")
than I should. But, for crying out loud, at least his pictures are
driven by ideas, and he understands that horror stems from accumulated
mood and atmosphere, not just scenes of evisceration and decapitation.
I don't think the monstrous, goofy Arctic Circle beings who finally
show up in the last few minutes of "The Last Winter" provide
much of a payoff -- Fessenden seems to suffer from the genre's tendency
toward literal-mindedness -- but they didn't ruin this tense and exciting
film for me either.

Fessenden began
his career as a sort of postmodern prankster (his early films include
shorts titled "Jaws," "A Face in the Crowd" and
"Chinatown"), and the catholic desire to blend seemingly
incompatible elements is the strength of his work. If the frozen,
isolated setting of "The Last Winter" -- the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, after a future congressional vote has opened
it to oil exploration -- deliberately recalls John Carpenter's "The
Thing," Fessenden has also cited Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala"
as an influence. Personally, I'd love to see him channel the Kurosawa-Tarkovsky
current more strongly and make the Carpenter-esque horror in his films
even more ambiguous or psychological than it is already. But I guess
he's too devoted to crass concerns like, you know, actually attracting
paying customers. Sellout!

From the opening
scene, featuring a bullshit-redolent corporate video from North Industries,
the company that has won the government contract to begin ANWR exploration,
we know that something is already going wrong at North's lonely Alaska
outpost. One of the workers, a wide-eyed post-collegiate kid named
Maxwell (Zach Gilford), has begun roaming the empty tundra on his
own at night, inadequately dressed, and mumbling about what he sees
out there. Hoffman (James LeGros), an environmental activist who's
been hired for P.R. purposes, has become convinced that the ANWR ecosystem
is melting down: Winter temperatures are well above normal and the
permafrost is melting; building the "ice roads" needed to
bring in heavy equipment seems impossible.

Project manager
Ed Pollack (terrific character actor Ron Perlman) doesn't want to
listen to any of Hoffman's left-wing whining, of course. The American
people want "energy independence," dammit, and he's there
to do their bidding. To make matters worse, Abby (Connie Britton),
the tomboyish blond who is Pollack's No. 2, has slid into bed with
Hoffman while Pollack (her ex) was away from the station. There's
never any doubt where Fessenden's sympathies lie here, but neither
of these adversaries is a cardboard cutout. Hoffman can be an arrogant
prima donna at times, and as the crew becomes cut off from civilization
and beset by one mysterious calamity after another, Pollack has to
wrestle between the core ideology that has defined his life so far
and the ineffable menace he can see building around them.

Gruesome and terrifying
things happen in "The Last Winter," but there's no gratuitous
gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building
sense that something really, really bad is about to happen, not just
to this lonely band of oil-field workers but to all of us. The vast
and empty tundra, the mysterious decades-old oil well Maxwell can't
stay away from and the spectral visions the crew begins to have at
night -- all those things feel like symbolic or Jungian keys as much
as clues to a literal mystery. As I say, the monster-movie element
becomes too literal for my taste by the time Hoffman and Pollack must
try to cross the tundra together on foot. But the very last shot of
the film is devastating, precisely because Fessenden shows us nothing:
a woman standing in a puddle of water, thunderstruck at what is unfolding
before her.

September 19, 2007 -- IT'S not nice to fool Mother Nature, because
eventually she's going to get even - good and even. That's the message
in "The Last Winter," an environmental horror film by East
Village indie auteur Larry Fessenden.

The setting is a pristine area of Alaska, where a corporation called
North Industries is preparing to drill for oil.
Corporate loudmouth Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) is determined to get
drilling equipment to his small, snowbound base. But there are obstacles,
including environmentalist Hoffman (James LeGros), who has been assigned
to the base to keep North Industries honest.

In the process, he beds second-in-command Abby (Connie Britton), who
used to bestow her favors on Pollack. (Messy, messy.)
But there are bigger problems. Mother Nature has seemingly gone bonkers.
When crew members start to die in unpleasant ways, Hoffman blames
a mind-altering "sour gas" unleashed by global warming.
Then a small plane crashes into the base, electricity and communications
go down, and the crew finds itself cut off from the outside world.
It's difficult to watch "The Last Winter" and not think
of the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Thing From Another World,"
in which an Arctic expedition digs up an alien creature frozen in
the ice.

But Fessenden is no copycat. He updates "The Last Winter"
to the age of global warming, and throws in a few CGI demons for good
measure.The gap-toothed Fessenden is an underrated director ("Habit,"
"Windigo") and actor (a stalker in the new Jodie Foster
thriller, "The Brave One"). "The Last Winter"
- which he directed, produced, edited and co-wrote - is his most expansive
directorial effort yet. While the slow buildup won't bowl 'em over
at suburban multiplexes, the film should please Fessenden's loyal
followers and win him new ones. LINK

Global chilling
Eco-horror tale short on horror but effectively unsettling

Now that "torture porn" seems to have finally run out of
new blood, maybe it's time to re-start another scary-film genre: eco-horror.
Fans with long memories may remember a few Earth-Day oriented pictures
back in the '70s, like "Frogs" and "Godzilla Vs. the
Smog Monster," "Silent Running" and "Soylent Green."
And now that people are talking -- and worrying -- about the environment
once more, the time may have come again.

Judging just by the evidence of "The Last Winter," it's
a territory worth exploring -- and full of far scarier horrors than
the S&M dungeons of "Saw."
"The Last Winter," with a nod to "John Carpenter's
The Thing," is set in a remote Alaskan encampment, where big-business
apologists and scientific skeptics are quarrelling over a new pipeline
project. Admitted, there's a chance to tap into huge reservoirs of
oil. But the temperature keeps going up, and so do the tempers. And
sometimes, if you listen hard enough, you can almost hear something
out there ...

"The Last Winter" was directed by Larry Fessenden, a cult
fave who deserves a larger cult, and perhaps some better understanding.
Although he's been compared to Carpenter and George Romero, his scares
draw more on Val Lewton's old movies, and the regional shivers of
August Derleth. Shadowy things hide, just out of sight. Old Inuit
legends turn out to be not so legendary at all.

The prognathous Ron Perlman plays the corporate bully while indie
regular James Le Gros plays the sensitive, bearded scientist; both
are good and immediately believable in their parts. If there's a problem,
it's that they're a little too perfectly suited for the roles -- it
would have been more interesting to switch casting, and have the hulking
Perlman play the eco-warrior, and the soft-spoken Le Gros the stubborn
capitalist.

But the two leads are fine, as is the rest of the small cast. The
woman who comes between Perlman and Le Gros is nicely sketched out
by Connie Britton, who manages to look both attractive and realistically
wind-chapped and weary; Kevin Corrigan adds a bit of quirky life as
Motor, the base-camp's Mr. Fix-it.

But this is really Fessenden's movie, and as in his previous films
-- "Wendigo" was the biggest hit -- he builds the mood slowly.
People quarrel, stupidly and for no reason. A character develops a
stubborn nosebleed that won't go away. Carefully kept scientific journals
dissolve into pages of scribble. Crows appear out of nowhere, and
watch, and wait. Shadowy herds stampede by night.

Horror fans drawn in by those Carpenter and Romero comparisons may
feel slightly tricked -- "The Last Winter" takes a while
to get going, and even when it does, there's little gore. The film's
biggest set piece is an airplane crash; the fiends remain resolutely
out of view for most of the film. (Which is actually a good thing
-- when they do show up, they look a little bit like ghostly Bullwinkles,
proving again the old "Curse of the Demon" lesson that it's
almost always better not to have a monster you can't afford.)

But even if this is no red-blooded shocker, its unsettling mood lingers
long past the final fade-out, hinting at all sorts of retribution
just lying in wait for polluters. And suggesting that, if Hollywood
stars are truly interested in preaching about the environment, they'd
do better to skip some of their rallies and ad campaigns and put their
time and talent in a few more films like this. LINK

In a kind of clumsy
infodump granted via an industrial promo film, we learn that North
Industries is going to start drilling for oil in the hitherto-protected
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. North Industries' team
is headed by overbearing macho jerk Pollock (deliciously played as
only Perlman can play overbearing macho jerks), who returns to the
Arctic Circle after spending time on the laps of the bigwigs at corporate
headquarters.
We humans are screwed, no matter how you see things.

Being an overbearing macho jerk, he really can't stand the fact that
his girl-pal/co-worker/bed buddy Abby (Britton) has hooked up with
"Greenie" ecologist Hoffman (LeGross), who along with his
assistant Elliot (Harrold) is tolerated on the site by North Industries
only as a kind of PR stunt. He also really can't stand having to deal
with "Greenies" at all, who, it must be said, seem annoyingly
to go out of their way to wear green throughout the movie.

Things are out of whack in the Arctic. Sort of in the same way that
things seem to be out of whack among the team. It's February, but
it's not cold enough to build ice roads. The permafrost is melting.
A game of touch football on the ice results in an ... oddity ... that
might have well-nigh impossible consequences. Bright-eyed kid Maxwell
(Friday Night Lights' Gilford) seems to have gone on a fugue-state
330-mile walkabout in a few hours. And giant herds of phantom caribou
are heard crashing about in the darkness. All this happens while certain
team members seem to be affected by the vast emptiness in a way that
mere cabin fever can't explain.

Something is under the ice that is thawing out after millennia. Is
it toxic gas? Or something a bit more ethereal ... malignant ... and
... aware?

Fessenden's frigid freak-out

Larry Fessenden is, for a lot of mainstream moviegoers, one of those
"Oh ... it's that guy!" actors. He can be seen in a convenience
store selling cigars to Sigourney Weaver in Imaginary Heroes, and
he can be seen in a convenience store menacing Jodie Foster in The
Brave One. He's also one of the most innovative and interesting low-budget
(and I mean shake-out-the-sofa-cushions-for-our-lab-fees low-budget)
horror filmmakers working today. In the truest sense, he's an auteur;
love them or hate them, Fessenden's horror movies—his Frankenstein
parable No Telling, his vampire drama Habit and his Wendigo—are
visions that only Larry Fessenden could have put on the screen.

The Last Winter is amazing for those familiar with Fessenden's work,
in that with this film he has a budget that allowed for location shooting
in Iceland and for fancy camerawork and effects. The leap is as dramatic
as Lars von Trier doing a Transformers movie. The question arises:
Playing in a new budgetary league, is Fessenden still capable of making
a movie that is uniquely his? Thankfully, the answer is yes. And on
top of that, the movie is damned good in and of itself, not just as
a Fessenden breakthrough.

The Last Winter blends science fiction with the supernatural in a
way that has rarely worked in films before—what binds these
two disparate approaches is Fessenden's sense of the poetic. There
is a poetic depiction of catastrophic weather changes that, due to
their grim-yet-almost-plausible implications, put to shame those depicted
in The Day After Tomorrow. This is followed by depictions of something
very old and godlike and angry lurking on the tundra. Bleakness, doom
and emptiness allow for this blend of global-warming SF and Arthur
Machen-like elder-creepiness. Through Fessenden's eye, the difference
between SF and supernatural apocalypse is just a matter of semantics;
we humans are screwed, no matter how you see things.

The Last Winter isn't without its faults. At times the characters
seem forced into being cardboard-ish tropes, and Fessenden gets a
bit preachy with his anti-global-warming message (much in the way
he got preachy about the dangers of unregulated genetic experimentation
in No Telling). Still, despite these shortcomings, The Last Winter
is well worth seeing as one of the smartest and most dreadful (as
in "full of dread") horror movies to come along in a while.

Due to the setting and mood of The Last Winter, comparisons to John
Carpenter's The Thing are inevitable. There's a different flavor to
the doom of The Last Winter, though. —Mike LINK

Moriarty Bundles
Up For Fessenden’s THE LAST WINTER And Spins Craig Zobel’s
GREAT WORLD OF SOUND!
Have you seen THE BRAVE ONE yet?

If so, you know that scene where Jodie’s in the convenience
store with the gun she just bought, and she’s all twitchy ‘cause
it’s still new. And while she’s in there, this guy comes
in and he’s all hopped up and he argues with the cashier. And
then he shoots her. And then Jodie hides. And then she makes a noise.
And he goes looking for her. And they sort of cat and mouse it and
the music builds and they draw it out and draw it out and they’re
right there and BLAM! She shoots him! You know that scene?

He’s one of those guys who’s not just in movies... he’s
reeeeeally into movies. He lives and breathes it. He acts for other
directors. He self-finances these small indie films. He loans a hand
to other people in setting films up. He does it all. He obviously
just plain loves it. Has it in his blood. And I think his movies,
even when they don’t quite work 100%, have such an obvious voice,
such a pure sort of focused pleasure in the craft of filmmaking, that
it forgives some of his weaknesses as a writer. I think this film’s
about on par with WENDIGO, his 2001 film, which I actually saw before
I saw his earlier HABIT, which is pretty raw and great in its own
right. I called WENDIGO a “supernatural STRAW DOGS” when
I saw it at the Fantasia Festival, and talking with him at that Festival,
he seemed to me to be incredibly down to earth and intent on making
films he actually wanted to see. There was something almost blue collar
about his approach to film, something that reminds me of guys like
Fuller or Cassavettes. It’s a job, so do it well.

I was reminded how much I like him when I spent a late night watching
THE LAST WINTER this week. Two in the morning, lights out, sound up.
This is a damn fine-looking movie. Fessenden’s working in wide
wide widescreen scope, and he knows how to use it. His cinematographer
here is Magni Agustsson, a native Icelander whose work is striking
and moody, always appropriate, essential for the way the film works.

When I spoke to Sean Penn this past week about INTO THE WILD, he talked
about Alaska and the things he heard before heading up to shoot there.
He talked about being changed by the experience, and how that was
what he wanted to capture in his film. These places at the edge of
mankind... they should humble you. This planet is so incredibly powerful,
and if it wants to, it will shake us all off like fleas. The notion
of poking and prodding this planet to the point where it strikes back
with whatever means are at its disposal… that’s pretty
crazy, but there’s a sick inevitability to it. If you believe
that nature adapts, then we’re due for a cataclysmic correction
of course in the near future after the way we’ve acted. And
THE LAST WINTER takes place at one of those moments, in one of those
places where things have worn a little thin, and nature has simply
had enough.

It’s a good cast, which allows Fessenden to really push them.
Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, Kevin Corrigan, Jamie Harrold,
and Zach Gilford all do really strong work, grounding the movie even
in the craziest moments. Fessenden only occasionally resorts to what
would be described as conventional scares, and even then, he handles
them with admirable grace and restraint. It would be very difficult
to sit through this entire film without thinking of John Carpenter’s
THE THING, but much more of this film is set in bright, blinding daylight.
The bleak snowscapes are the same, though, that sense of being completely
cut off by both geography and nature. Here, an oil company is behind
schedule in establishing a drilling operation, and they send in a
specialist (Perlman) to get the project back on-schedule. Without
getting into the exact nature of the horror, suffice it to say that
bodies start to turn up, and things get very strange very quickly.
You could certainly make the case for this being an environmental
horror film, as it appears that climate change is responsible for
releasing whatever is causing the disturbance among the men and women
on Perlman’s team.

There’s one creepy set piece in the middle of the film where
they all watch a video of something that happened, and the film builds
an unsettling mood that never quite erupts into something concrete.
It may frustrate viewers who want a big finish or an easy explanation,
but for those who like their horror to play with ideas and embrace
the ambiguous, THE LAST WINTER is a small gem. LINK

Arctic
horror film is easy to warm up toJames Le Gros plays a troubled climatologist at an oil company
camp in "The Last Winter."

Apparently there is something new under the sun: a psychological global-warming
horror film. "The Last Winter" sounds like a genre-movie
platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops
short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well. Whatever eldritch
filmmaking wavelength actor-turned-director Larry Fessenden is onto,
he deserves to be encouraged.

The movie takes place in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, at an
oil company test-drilling camp overseen by a macho, insecure corporate
cowboy named Pollack (Ron Perlman). While he's been south at headquarters
for a month, getting permission to bring in the big rigs, his second-in-command,
Abby (Connie Britton), has taken up with Hoffman (James Le Gros),
a bearded climatologist the EPA has forced on the project. Pollack
hates environmentalists even when they're not in Abby's bed.

A mood of weird and gathering doom is established at the outset, and
as "The Last Winter" progresses, it grips tighter and tighter.
There's an unseasonable thaw and the permafrost is melting. One of
the base personnel, Pollack's young nephew Maxwell (Zach Gilford),
is acting increasingly deranged, as though he were seeing things the
others can't. Maybe he's the canary in this coal mine; maybe, Hoffman
surmises, the melt is releasing toxic fumes that have been locked
in the deep freeze for tens of thousands of years.
Or perhaps there's a supernatural explanation - the strength of "The
Last Winter" is that it's open to any and all theories. As an
actor, Fessenden tends to play wiry little losers (he can be seen
as the convenience store robber in the current Jodie Foster thriller
"The Brave One"), but as a filmmaker he's got a thing for
ancient American ghosts returning with a vengeance. His 2001 film
"Wendigo" was about a half-human beast from Native American
folklore stalking a family in upstate New York.

There's talk about the Wendigo in "The Last Winter," too,
as well as a few sketchy, uncompelling special effects - Fessenden's
better at mood than specifics. He gets strong performances from Perlman
and Le Gros, though - the former playing a blowhard who slowly caves
in, the latter as a rational young progressive terrified of losing
his sanity. Rounding out the cast are Kevin Corrigan ("The Departed"),
Jamie Harrold, Pato Hoffmann, Joann Shenandoah, and a murder of crows
with a taste for red meat.

The ghosts of other movies flit through "The Last Winter,"
too - 1951's "The Thing From Another World" and its 1982
remake, "The Thing," both of which found dread under the
polar ice; "The Shining" with its wintry personality meltdown;
the trapped and dwindling cast of "Alien."

Fessenden taps into more recent fears, though, and while the movie's
too genre-bound to climb into the cherry-picker with Al Gore, it hints
at a coming B-movie apocalypse: a rough beast freed by rising temperatures
and only now slouching home. In "The Last Winter," we meet
the alien and the alien is us.

While it’s easy to view the recent spate of save-the-environment documentaries as America’s newest take on the horror genre, I doubt that anyone thinks Al Gore has supplanted Freddy Krueger. The possibility of an incoming apocalypse at the hands of natural disasters is a fearsome conceit, but ponderous environmental discourse leaves little room for formidable scares of the “boo!” variety. However, somebody gets the potential: Similar to the way that the original Godzilla is actually a rumination on the ills of nuclear experimentation, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter uses conventional chills to create a surging diatribe on humanity’s willingness to let nature fall into disarray.

Fessenden’s drama takes place at an Alaskan oil reserve, amid stark white landscapes and whispering drafts of frozen air. The characters, of which there are under a dozen, usually speak in hushed tones about the tribulations of their research, although occasionally voices rise to indicate alarm about their increasingly claustrophobic situation (the press notes’ reference to the setting of John Carpenter’s The Thing are apt). The disgruntled team leader (Ron Perlman) frequently bitches about the bureaucracy of their management, but he shrugs off the insistence of a colleague that the environment’s increasing warmth has endangered their research. “Don’t start that global warming shit,” he gripes, giving us the movie’s version of the self-damning declaration, “I’ll be right back,” which horror films often use to foreshadow incoming slaughter.

The unique twist of Winter arrives with the lethal manifestation of that global warming shit but, rather than appearing as melting ice caps and insurmountable tempests akin to The Day After Tomorrow, trouble takes root as a freaky ghost-like presence that rises from the muck of our mistreated planet. Fessenden’s monsters are poorly represented with lo-res CGI, but that’s essentially part of the point. The beasts of global warming don’t have to look real since, in reality, we still have trouble accepting their existence. LINK

Who said that an environmental horror film couldn't be didactic and
spooky at the same time? In The Last Winter, Larry Fessenden's B-movie
Arctic chiller (it's like the 1951 The Thing with more ethereal demons),
life slowly unravels for a team of oil-company workers who are out
to establish an Alaskan drilling station. Are the mishaps merely accidents?
Or is the tundra, unfrozen by global warming, taking its vengeance?
Die-hard greenies may find this as unsettling as it's meant to be.
For everyone else, it's closer to an atmospheric act of recycling.
B LINK

Fright movies
get a bad rap. It's true that most are garbage; they insult your intelligence
and eat time (and money) that you'll never get back. So it's a pleasant
surprise when a horror movie rises from nowhere and offers something
more. Many of director Larry Fessenden's previous films (including
the great Wendigo and Habit) were good examples of smart and well-acted
horror that transcended genre trappings. The Last Winter is no exception.

Here, Fessenden mines environmental issues to craft a topical story
about a research team in Alaska's Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
The team — there to scout oil drilling sites — is leader
Ed (Ron Perlman, Hellboy, City of Lost Children), his former lover
and second in command Abby (Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights),
newbie Maxx (Zach Gilford) and loopy mechanic Motor (Kevin Corrigan,
Slums of Beverly Hills, Henry Fool). James (James LeGros, Phantasm
II and Zodiac) and Elliot (Jamie Harold, I Shot Andy Warhol) are employees
hired to evaluate the ecological impact, and they won't sign off on
the necessary paperwork. Ed is a right-wing blowhard under work pressure
and he continually spouts off about how he represents the "American
people" and their demands for crude oil. He considers James and
Elliot nuisances and attempts to bully them in hopes of cutting though
so much environmental red tape.

So when Maxx disappears while mapping some territory only to return
looking freaked and disoriented, he claims he saw spirits. Most of
the staff calls it cabin fever. Desperate and maybe deranged, he heads
out to capture what he's seen with a video camera. Maxx is found dead
the next morning. But what he caught on video ignites the team's growing
paranoia. Strange incidents and deaths ensue, and the team spirals
down a horrific path of accusations, violence and retribution.

Nothing in The Last Winter is ever spelled out. It's shot in Iceland
on a bleak and foreboding landscape, and the crew's claustrophobia-inducing
living quarters go lengths to enhance the film's haunting sense of
isolation and tension. The characters struggle between what's supernatural
and what's reasonable or rationally explainable. The horror burns-in
slowly and is partially built on character conflict, which pays off
in some unexpected ways — particularly in the apocalyptic ending
that recalls Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo. With a cerebral, multi-themed
approach to fright and "Don't fuck with Mother Nature" winks,
The Last Winter continues the director's inimitable and narrative-driven
approach to horror. LINK

Some might recognize
Larry Fessenden as the first person Jodie Foster kills in The Brave
One, but for the past 20-odd years, he has been making his own way
in film and, in the process, has crafted some of the most interesting
and provocative horror films of recent years.

Building on the offbeat promise he showed with 2001's Wendigo, Fessenden
has crafted a dangerous film with The Last Winter. Its genre pedigree
is spot-on, with an isolated group of workers and scientists, some
ethereal and bloody mayhem and the kind of atmospheric dread you don't
get from most contemporary horror.

The cast features Ron Perlman (Hellboy) and James LeGros (Phantasm
II) as philosophically opposed men battling something unspeakable
for their own survival. At the same time, you can read their conflict
as a battle for the soul of humanity.

Don't think this is an impenetrable art film, though — far from
it. It's got blood and guts and some quite spectacular monsters.

But what makes The Last Winter such a delightful surprise is that
it's just as good as an eco-treatise as it is an austere horror film.
To put it in "pull quote" terms, The Last Winter does a
better job of playing with environmental fear and unease than either
An Inconvenient Truth or The 11th Hour, and it has better scares than
Resident Evil: Extinction or Rob Zombie's Halloween remake. LINK

"Alaska, the land of black gold." So named by a promo film
for the fictional North Industries, the setting for Larry Fessenden's
new eco-horror film is wide, white and windy — and not nearly
so willing to give up its riches as North presumes. Combining global
warming politics with smartly allusive cinematography The Last Winter
isn't so much scary as it is poignant and provocative.

The menace of the Arctic is set up early, and cagily associated with
the man who wants most to exploit it. Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) arrives
at the base camp knowing that he's right, his massive, can-do energy
contrasted with the implacable snowscape all around him. The weary
advance crew is waiting for temperatures to drop in order to begin
drilling in a formerly protected wilderness preserve. The unusually
warm February has precluded bringing in the necessary equipment. Ed
is impatient with such details and starts imagining alternative ways
to get the machines moving.

Aside from the weather, Ed's most visible obstacle is Jim (James Le
Gros), the "greenie" North has brought in to write a company-friendly
"impact statement." Jim submits not only that the project
is environmentally unsound, but also that the environment is unsound,
or more precisely, "unfamiliar and erratic." But even as
rain falls, ice melts and Jim makes a fervent case ("The climate's
changing exponentially, it's collapsing"), Ed's focus is on the
younger man's affair with Abby (Connie Britton). Even if he knows
his own relationship with her wasn't true love, news of their trysting
only adds insult to injury.

While the humans roil about, their concerns trivial, the greater plot
is indicated by remarkable framing and a pervasive wind on the soundtrack.
The literal explanation is corny, if grand: The beastie-ghosts thundering
and dissolving in front of the film's designated sensitive "kid,"
Maxwell (Zach Gilford), appear to be the return of those fossils now
destined to be fuel sources. Like other horror movies that filter
existentialist fears through the Arctic's isolation (John Carpenter's
The Thing being the model), this one emphasizes the effects of vast
whiteness on an eroding, increasingly desperate community.

The film is best when it abandons dialogue and leaves the camera to
do its very spooky work. Following an impromptu football game Ed organizes
on his first night in camp, the individuals retreat to their rooms,
the camera peering in their windows one at a time, lurking. When they
realize that Maxwell has wandered into the white, the camera actually
waits and watches as riders set off on Ski-Doos, their shapes receding
until they're almost invisible. The sheer patience of such imagery
makes the long shots feel lonely and sad, without emotional payoff
or resolution, and it's far more daunting than any ghost. LINK

This year's crop of "original" horror films featured numerals in the titles, like HOSTEL 2 and SAW IV. The Best Horror Film I saw in 2007 was not a sequel, a remake, or an adaptation; it was Larry Fessenden's THE LAST WINTER, starring Ron Perlman, James LeGross, and indie darling Kevin Corrigan.

THE LAST WINTER was produced by Fessenden's Glass Eye Pix company and released by IFC (Indpendent Film Channel)Films. This makes sense, since IFC regularly shows Fessenden's excellent films HABIT and WENDIGO. Unfortunately, this also meant that the filmmaker's newest offering received only a limited theatrical release.

I had planned to review THE LAST WINTER when Fear Zone launched, but someone applying for a reviewer's position offered to do it, and I was swamped, and... one thing didn't lead to another, and a review never appeared. IFC's publicist also proved little help in landing interviews with the film's stars, so we had little to work with as far as promoting the film.

Not any more! THE LAST WINTER should be seen by every serious horror film fan out there. It's a sober, beautifully lensed film with wide open vistas and aerial cinematography that captures frozen desolation even better than JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING. The similarities don't end there: both films deal with research teams operating in subfreezing temperatures, and THE LAST WINTER perfectly captures the crisp verisimilitude of such 70s films as DELIVERANCE and THE CONVERSATION. THE LAST WINTER is what would be described in literary terms as "quiet horror"--it's about character moments, melancholy, and an almost mythic Otherness, and it harks back to the political and environmental concerns of Fessenden's first feature film, NO TELLING, OR, THE FRANKENSTEIN COMPLEX. When the advance team for an oil company sets up shop in Alaska, there is hell to pay.

Do you complain about the state of horror films today? Do you want to support intelligent, adult material? Then seek this movie out! Don't let it disappear under your radar. It will be available on DVD as a Blockbuster Exclusive (that's a pretty chilling thought right there)in May, 2008, and everywhere else in July. LINK

A well done low budget indie production that lets the imagination of the viewers picture how bad it can get when mother earth is finally pushed past the breaking point

It’s payback time in the ANWR as money grubbing oil drillers dig one test well too many. The setting is the pristine wilderness of the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge, recently opened for oil exploration by the environmentally-challenged US federal government. But something is not right. Al Gore warned us that thing were heating up, earth-wise, but nobody expected this. Plane crashes, prehistoric alien ghosts, oil drillers burned to death, oil drillers frozen to death and oil drillers just plain scared to death, the hapless crew of the remote outpost runs for their lives. But not before they push Mother Earth past that final tipping point. Some people live and some people die. It’s hard to say which group is better off. In the end only the crows seem to be having a good time. Always adaptable, they survive the most radical changes in environment and feast off the eyes of the once-dominant human race. Thank you, Mr. Hitchcock.

Ron Perlman plays Ed Pollack, alpha oil-boss and ultimate team player fixated with conquering the environment and making oodles of dough-re-me at the same time. If it was up to Ed, he would dispense with the drilling, nuke the earth cover off the oil reserves and collect the caribou steaks for later. Opposing Ed is intellectual environmental watchdog James Hoffman (James LeGros). James has been around the block a few times and wastes only a little time preaching about what the audience already knows: these oil-drillers are messing with Mother Nature and there will be hell to pay. Nonetheless he and Ed mix it up with the standard environment-versus-the-corporation arguments. But the real argument is not who is exploring the ANWR but who is exploring tough and attractive Abby Sellers.

Abby (Connie Britton) is one of the tight-knit outpost crew and she and alpha-oil Ed have passed more than a few arctic nights together in the mummy bag. But there’s a new kid on the block and Mr. Environment Hoffman has started a global warming program of his own while alpha-oil is away. Trouble on the tundra. A grounded and hard-nosed technician not unlike Sigourney Weaver’s classic performance of Ripley in the original “Alien,” when the tough guys around her are losing their minds, she is keeping hers. But it ain’t easy, what with the ice melting out from under her, the planes crashing through the walls and those damn crows pecking at your eyes at every chance. Thanks again, Mr. Hitchcock.

A low budget indie production, “Last Winter” does a lot
with virtually no special effects and only one stunt scene that is
a cheap plane embedded into a cheap building. Kudos for that. The
strength in the film lies in its ability to draw the audience into
imagining the horror of the earth spirit gone awry. The film supplies
the desolate and threatening white-out conditions that warn the human
race to stay away with each howling gust. It supplies the low, rumbling,
threatening sound track of ill-defined dissonance broadcasting that
something is very wrong. Even worse, something is wrong and we don't
know what it is. Tributes to Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging
Rock” and the more recent hand-held indie smash, “Blair
Witch Project.”

The sum total of all this is fair acting by the three leads and a very well executed screenwriting and directorial performance by Mssrs. Fessenden and Leaver. Perfect timing in the wake of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.” Ironically enough, the freak rain that happens in the middle of the arctic winter, boding ill things to come, actually happened amongst the sub-zero temperatures at the shooting location in Iceland. Are we that far away from climatic Armageddon? As David Suzuki said, “We will not destroy earth, it will survive. But we may well cause such change in the environment that it will no longer support us.”
Learn to talk with crows… LINK

Every once and
awhile a film comes along usually under the radar that simply blows
you away and can make you once again believe that there is still creative
and talented filmmakers out there that aren't interested in giving
us another hollow pointless remake. Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter
is one of those films. It's easily one of the best films I've seen
in the last few years and I would put this film up there with modern
classics like The Descent and the low budget gem Shallow Ground. Before
I start rambling on about how much I loved this film I'll give you
a brief outline of the plot. Now I'm not going to give away to much
but if you don't like any plot points revealed then consider this
your warning "Spoiler Alert!"

The film is about
a group of researchers and drillers that have been hired by an American
oil drilling company called KIC. They have sent the group out to a
remote outpost in the Northern Artic National Wildlife Refuge. The
plan is to study the area and convince the government that drilling
in the area will have very little affect on the protected land and
to start drilling as soon as possible. It becomes clear very soon
though that not everything is exactly right with the group. Not everyone
in the group are not on the same page. James Hoffman played by James
LeGros wants to shut down the project because of fears of what it
will do to the environment and even global warming. On the other side
is Ed Pollack played by the great Ron Perlman who is a company man
that cares very little for anything besides getting the job at hand
completed which just so happens to be starting the drilling. Soon
some of the crew start to talk about seeing or hearing strange things
outside and the outpost is bombarded by freak weather such as a sudden
rain storm. After one of the men is found naked frozen to death out
side near a drilling hole the remaining crew members start to fear
that there might be a unseen supernatural force trying to kill them.

The film heavily
borrows from films like Carpenter's The Thing but only in the aspects
of groups of people in secluded areas without any help from the outside
world. There are no aliens, serial killers, infections or any of the
normal plot devices normally used to create fear in a horror movie.
Instead the filmmakers use atmosphere, music, lighting and an overwhelming
sense of dread to create a claustrophobic horror film that is one
of the most effective I've seen in years. Near the end the force or
whatever it is that is killing the crew off one by one is revealed
which in most films what is finally shown is almost always a huge
let down from all the build up but even with the small budget of the
production they still manage to create effects that not only work
inside the story but are also original and scary enough that they
actually add to the experience of the film. One of the most important
pieces of a low budget film that has very little happening in the
way of action for large portions of it, is to have strong actors that
can carry the film and keep you interested in what will happen to
them. The entire cast of this film does just that. None of the cast
are one dimensional or cliche and every actor adds human depth to
them and makes them that much more believable. The standout performance
would have to be Ron Perlman's though. He's performance although rough
and very unforgiving also has a vulnerable side to it that I've rarely
seen from him.

There was very
little gore in the film but when there was it was brutal and surprising
because of the realness of the scenes and a few of the more brutal
ones even made me cringe. I'm usually not a fan of CGI at all but
the rare times that it was used in this film it was done well and
not overused. Music was also a high not and at times reminded me of
the effectiveness of the score in The Thing. The music and natural
sounds weren't overused or used to build up a scene for a jump scare
instead it was used to create more of a creepy atmosphere.

The highlight
of the film would have to be Larry Fessenden who Acted, Directed,
Produced, Edited and Co-wrote the film that delivers an almost perfect
horror film. I've only seen this film once but I have a strong feeling
that after repeat viewings I think this may be in my top ten. The
best way I can describe this film is that it's a quite small film
that will draw you in to it in the first few minutes and won't let
you go till the haunting end. If your looking for an original effectively
scary film then this is the one. The film will finally get a region
1 dvd release on May 20, 08 and I highly recommend everyone goes out
and picks up a copy. I know I will.”
Learn to talk with crows… LINK

A typical virus, like the flu, also known as
a sub microorganism, will invade and live off of a host, essentially
wreaking havoc on a system, creating a “war” between host
and invader. The human body will fight said virus with the immune
system. This is apparent when sudden chills, a sore throat, coughs,
or sneezing come about. While the immune system will effectively battle
the invader, it can often be weakened by this exertion allowing other
bacteria to invade the body causing problems like pneumonia.

The
idea that the human race is in itself a virus like system, essentially
waging war against the planet as it battles back with natural disasters
and bacteria of its own, isn’t particularly new. It is however,
something that hasn’t been explored a great deal on film. The
Last Winter delves into this territory with varying degrees of success.
It is a very deliberate, matter-of-fact, and well crafted film that
will likely struggle in finding an audience willing to embrace it.

Macho,
single-minded, team leader Pollock (Ron Perlman) has returned to his
extremely rural Alaskan oil drilling live-work quarters to find things
different than when he left. His second-in-command Abby (Connie Britton)
is shacking up with the perceived enemy James (James LeGros), a Greenpeace
advocate sent up to do an environmental impact study for Public Relations
purposes.

As
James unearths information about the unusually warm temperatures and
possible gases emitting from previously unthawed frost, young intern
Maxwell (Zachary Gilford) becomes increasingly detached from the team,
staring frequently into the expansive snowy landscape convinced he
sees something. His behaviour ultimately presages the peculiarities
and freak-outs that the increasingly dwindling team succumbs to.

The
human-viral allegory is introduced to the film early on. Using footage
of manmade disasters, and Mother Nature’s retaliations, the
film sets up a very specific conflict that is paralleled partially
by the Pollock-James/Corporate-Environment dualism. The film stays
true to this allegory throughout leaving a lasting impression on those
who embrace the text. Those who take the film literally will likely
be confused by the later outcomes; primarily those involving Wendigo’s,
mythically known to symbolize greed and excess with cannibalistic
killing in primarily cold regions.

The
Last Winter balances this overt allegory with careful detail to character
development and believable interaction. Half of the film is dedicated
to building up a sense of unease in the claustrophobic environment
inhabited by this makeshift family. The dialogue is smooth and natural,
while each character progresses realistically with their own arc.
The organic flow of each character is never sacrificed for plotting
or forced conflict, making the horror element of the film more upsetting
than the genre is used to.

While
the film would be classified as a horror strictly in the set-up/payoff
sense, it doesn’t adhere to any particular expectations or conventions
of the genre. Death happens in the film, it exists matter-of-factly,
without gratuity or glossing over, leaning towards realistic and upsetting.
The loss of life in this movie is felt, and reactions of the remaining
survivors are very true.

Writer/Director
Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has created another intimate and
intelligent horror film. He pays great detail to the trajectory of
each character, while remaining true to his allegory. The film is
well shot, using directorial flourish sparsely and to greater effect
as a result.

It’s
a shame that horror fans will likely be bored by this film, and that
fans of character dramas will be thrown off by the subject matter.
The Last Winter is a solid environmental horror film, struggling only
in the denouement, which will frustrate audiences watching the film
with literal expectations. Link

The Last Winter is a scary addition to the constrained cubbyhole of
smart, topical horrors, few of which we’ve seen since 2003’s
British shocker 28 Days Later.

Eternity’s
a pretty long time. But it quickly becomes an ugly long time when
one thinks about how he or she will be spending it (reincarnated,
in Heaven or Hell, or in a coffin or an urn). Eternity is so undeniably
boundless that the prospect of its endless duration is deeply unsettling
(for most people). Nature can have that same uncomforting effect,
and, when a motion picture plays off of that effect, the result can
be frightening. Take, for example, Antarctica: it’s a place
of such magnitude and vacancy that its seemingly illimitable emptiness
becomes threatening. There are certain regions of Alaska that have
been forsaken as Antarctica has, lifeless and expansive plains of
snowy oblivion. One of these massive voids provides the setting for
The Last Winter. And director Larry Fessenden films it to terrifying
results, creating an atmosphere last matched by John Carpenter’s
1982 classic The Thing (which, by no coincidence, took place in Antarctica).

The Film –
Within the Arctic province of Northern Alaska, gruff, hard-shelled
Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) leads an eight-person team of evaluators,
which has been sent by the U.S. mainland-based oil company K.I.C.
Corporation, whose intent is to survey the Northern Artic National
Wildlife Refuge for potential drilling sites. But there’s something
in the atmosphere that doesn’t want them there—a “driving
force,” one character desperately explains—and its presence
is eventually felt by everyone in the group.

When the crew’s
youngest member, Maxwell, claims that he saw something out in the
snow, then is found dead days later, fear envelopes in his associates,
causing them to question their judgment and sanity. And Hoffman (James
LeGros), who’s employed by the government rather than K.I.C.,
to ensure that they’re running things as they said they would,
insists that he has the answer: hydrogen sulfide (sour gas), which
had been frozen beneath the ice for thousands of years, is being released
by the rising Arctic temperatures and, consequently, is causing hallucinations.
Fessenden, who co-wrote the script with Robert Leaver, provokes intellectual
attentiveness from his audience, who must form their own conclusion
as the whether or not the chilling events that transpire in his film
are the result of an environmental crisis or a supernatural phenomenon.

The Last Winter is unnerving for reasons beyond that which its horror
conventions inspire. Its desolation is a key catalyst in its distribution
of apprehension, but, for a more thematic, less cinematic reason,
so is its ecological motive, which summons issues that have frequently
been pushed aside in the last few years and provides the film an eerie
plausibility that is seldom present in today’s scare flicks.
Regardless, the movie’s tension would not have coiled as tautly
as it did without the keen acuity of Fessenden (whose modest last
effort, 2002’s Wendigo, was unable to attain this film’s
consistency), who directs it with the awareness and craft of a master,
complying only with the viewers’ imagination (and not with the
clichéd tactics of suspense horror) to create an overpowering
sense of dread (much like, though not as well as, ’99’s
The Blair Witch Project).

The performances
mold well to the tone of the film, though Perlman’s typecast
stubborn badass quickly grows tired and even irritating (there’s
no wry humor to level his willful skepticism like in Hellboy). Beyond
LeGros’ vacillating protagonist, the only other two characters
with prominent screen time are Maxwell, who’s well-played by
Zack Gilford (TV’s Friday Night Lights), though he merely lasts
thirty minutes, and Abby (Connie Britton), one of the gang’s
only two women (the other is the station’s cook, Dawn), who
Ed has a thing for but who’s in a relationship with Hoffman.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a standout act from anyone in
the film if you go searching, but one isn’t necessary—the
film’s about creating a believability that’s real enough
to go unnoticed and make its viewers feel uneasy, and it succeeds
in both cases, and the cast and their roles are an undeniable reason.

The Extras –
On the DVD, viewers are given the option of watching the entire film
with director commentary (which could be useful for those who get
lost in the story or want to know what Fessenden was thinking when
he filmed specific scenes) and watching a short, 5-minute presentation
called Behind the Scenes of The Last Winter, though it’s more
a series of cast interviews about the film’s subtext and director
than a making-of or behind-the-scenes peek. Nonetheless, it’s
always interesting to hear the actors’ opinions of a film they’re
working on, especially when your own opinion of the film is positive,
and those opinions are made clear in the DVD’s additional featurettes.Link

With The Last Winter, director Larry Fessenden
cleverly devises another thriller cauldron in which to stir up mysterious
goings-on and endangered protagonists. Unfortunately, he also drops
some clichéd characters into the stew. But Fessenden’s
latest is more evidence that the filmmaker knows plenty about craft
and has a sense of style. The film deserves attention, not just because
of its important global warming message but as a genre piece done
a little more intelligently.

Substituting
the iconic embattled house or cave, dorm, log cabin or motel with
an isolated oil company outpost in Alaska (Iceland is a nice stand-in),
Fessenden brings together a team working for fictional American oil
giant North Industries. Parked on the ice slab are the proverbial
unsuspecting suspects. There’s pushy, gung-ho boss Pollack (Rob
Perlman), who kisses corporate butt while kicking those of underlings.
Joining global warming to heat up the cold Alaskan climes is team
hottie Abby (Connie Britton), who was once Pollack’s girlfriend.
She’s taken up with hero archetype Hoffman (James LeGros), the
requisite goody-goody, a scientist and outside observer concerned
about the corporation’s plans and the changing atmosphere. As
Hoffman himself puts it, he’s up north for “the American
people,” not for North Industries.

Also
on board is requisite nerd Taylor (Jamie Harrold), slacker Motor (Kevin
Corrigan), and Dawn and Lee (Joanne Shenandoah and Pato Hoffmann),
a couple of natives who give a supernatural, mythical whiff to the
proceedings.

Hewing
to formula, things start looking weird. What, for instance, is lurking
under that valve pipe? What about those creepy crows? And, as Hoffman
asks, why is the permafrost melting? A succession of mysterious occurrences
unfold as various team members like Maxwell (Zach Gilford) venture
beyond the station to do their work, which, in the case of The Last
Winter, involves affronting Mother Nature by exploiting hidden Alaskan
oil reserves. Mother’s a mean mamma: Those who wander beyond
the station return somehow afflicted. As Maxwell puts it, “There’s
like a force out there!”

Matters
escalate when a huge accident leaves the crew vulnerable and trapped
at the station without any radio contact. Pollack and Hoffman are
forced to descend into the vast, bleak, dark white to find help. They
may not get salvation but we get the message—don’t mess
with Mother Nature. We also get an explosive ending.

Fessenden
again does genre with a little lagniappe—here it’s horror
with a frozen topping and “green” sauce. An opening voiceover
mimicking a North Industries promo sounds like the voice of Patricia
Clarkson, again signaling that as horror, The Last Winter is of a
higher pedigree. Link

There is one special feature on the DVD but oh is it a doozy. It is
a two-hour long documentary on the making of the film from pillar
to post. From the location scouts, to the pre-production shooting
and organization, to the production, to the post production, to why
things had to get cut out, to an interview with the co-writer and
director Larry Fessenden in which he describes not wanting to go mainstream
and attending his biggest film festival ever in the Toronto Film Festival,
making movies with messages and making a horror movie not in typical
Hollywood fashion.

This is a simply
awesome documentary as we get all aspects of making the film and what
it takes to actually put something like this together. Some of the
most interesting portions have to do with working in Iceland, having
boats as trailers, filming in the middle of a snow plain, building
an actual set in the middle of a frozen wasteland and more.

Worth checking
it out regardless of whether you enjoy the movie or not. Link

The DVD for The Last Winter is remarkable in its special features,
especially considering the limited release of the film. I love that
a festival hit like this one and a film that, to be fair, had a lot
more ardent fans than myself who will be seeking it out on DVD, got
such a great home treatment. The "Making-of" documentary
about the film is longer than the flick itself and covers every aspect
of production from inception through post-production and to a festival
interview with Fessenden from last summer. The documentary is overwhelming
in its detail, but if you need more, you'll find it in a commentary
by Fessenden. In the end, The Last Winter is an original horror movie
that swings for the fences. It may eventually go foul, but you have
to admire the attempt. Link

Extras Review: The extras include an audio commentary by co-writer/director
Larry Fessenden. He talks in great detail about his film, becoming
very candid when discussing the tough story choices he was faced with
before even going behind the camera.

The only other
extra is Making The Last Winter, a massive, two-hour documentary chronicling
the making of the movie, from development to post-production. This
piece is both informative and a breeze to sit through, despite the
long running time.

IFC’s disc features a very worthwhile audio commentary from
Fessenden, who’s informative, articulate and even quite funny
in a rather dry sort of way. Of the film’s use of archival footage
of oil drilling he explains, “It was very important to me to
show oil drilling in a movie about oil drilling with no oil drilling.”
It’s fun to hear him talk about his excitement over the benefits
of working with a larger budget—the many helicopter shots, the
dolly set-ups just for little stuff, the birds from Harry Potter,
“the real stars of the movie,” Fessenden confesses—as
well as with very good actors, and with Iceland, where he actually
shot most of The Last Winter. (And it’s funnier still to learn
that the groans of desire we hear from LeGros during his off-screen
humpy-pumpy were actually taken from a scene in which he’s helping
Perlman escape from drowning.) All in all, one can’t help but
appreciate what Fessenden is trying to make: a thoughtful, medium-budget
movie with indie credibility in a genre overrun with crappy excess.
The Last Winter isn’t entirely a triumph in this regard, but
it’s close enough to light the hope that Fessenden can keep
going in this racket.
Link